Table of Contents

- FOREWORD

by Marshall Terry

- PREFACE:

WARNING: THIS BOOK COULD BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH

- LET’S HAVE ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE!

- THE BOOK THAT SCARRY BUILT:

BEING IN PART A DISCOURSE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

- TEA TIME ON THE GREEN:

OR DOUBLE-BOGEY AT 8:00

- THE PROFITS OF PROSE

- IF THEY DON’T WIN IT’S A SHAME:

BASEBALL AS MYTH AND EQUALIZER

- OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

- MY FIRST DATE

- LITERARY WORTH:

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO ARBITRATION

- TROUT FISHING IN TEXAS

- ELVIS AND US

- ERROR IN, ERROR OUT:

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE IMPACT OF THE WORD PROCESSOR ON COMPOSITION

- LOVE AND A BRIGHT MORNING

- ENVOY:

WHY YOU PROBABLY WON’T MEET THE AUTHOR

- BOOKS BY CLAY REYNOLDS

OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

Random Thoughts on Harmful Things

by

CLAY REYNOLDS

Stone River Press

Conroe, TX

OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

Random Thoughts on Harmful Things

These fourteen personal essays by one of Texas' most prolific authors are in turn humorous, literary, informative, nostalgic and all-around enjoyable to read. Written at various periods in his life, they invite us to come to know a man who not only reveals himself as only a poet can do, but who also speaks with profundity and truth about life, its foibles, successes and failures. Whether visiting Aunt Minnie, Graceland, a trout stream, or a secluded book signing, we are always entertained and wiser for the trip.

OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

Random Thoughts on Harmful Things

Copyright © 2007 by Clay Reynolds

Foreword by Marshall Terry

Cover Photo © Corbis

Author Photo by Judy Reynolds

Cover Design by Kellye Sanford

Electronic Version Cover Art by Ron Miller

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as provided by the United States Copyright Law.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006938019

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Stone River Press

2468 Southline Road

Conroe, TX 77384

www.stoneriverpress.com

ISBN-10: 0-9728775-5-X

ISBN-13: 978-0-9728775-5-5

eISBN: 978-1-62579-210-5

Electronic Version by Baen Books

http://www.baen.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee!” is revised and expanded from “Foreword: ‘Coffee’.” How the Cimarron River Got Its Name and Other Stories about Coffee. Ed. Ernestine Sewell Linck. Plano, TX: Republic of Texas Press, 1995: ix-xxi.

“Trout Fishing in Texas” is revised and expanded from the original essay by the same title that appeared in Re: Arts & Letters. 17.1 (1991): 49-56.

“If They Don’t Win, It’s a Shame” is revised and distilled from the original essay by the same title that appeared in Palo Alto Review. 1.1 (1992): 56-58, 60.

“The Book that Scarry Built” is revised and corrected from the original essay by the same title that appeared in Studies in American Humor. 5 [new series).4 (1986-87 [pub. 1990]): 280-286.

“The Profits of Prose” is revised from the original essay, “The Profits of Place: Using a Lie to Tell the Truth.” Texas Journal. 19.2 (1997): 48-57.

“On Snakes and Sex and Playing in the Rain” is revised from the original essay, “On Snakes and Sex and Playing in the Rain: Folklore and Popular Fictions.” Southwestern American Literature. 21.2 (1996): 73-80; rpt. Best Texas Writing. Eds., Joe Ahearn and Brian Clements. Dallas: Rancho Loco Press, 1998: 60-70.

“Elvis and Us” is revised from the original essay by the same title that appeared in High Plains Literary Review. 10.3 (1995): 21-35.

Portions of “My First Date” appeared as a fictional piece, “Goodnight . . . Sweetheart” Texas Short Stories. Ed. Billy Bob Hill. Dallas: Browder Springs Press, 1997: 389-403.

“Love and a Bright Morning” is considerably revised and corrected from the original essay that appeared in Concho River Review. 4.2 (1990): 53-65.

FOR BETTY,

WHO ENJOYS TRIMMING MY OPINIONS

FOREWORD

by Marshall Terry

A prolific writer, Clay Reynolds has been in turn a scholar, a critic and a novelist. In his fiction he creates, and recreates, a world he knows with head and heart from growing up in and around Quanah, Texas, finding it rich in human terms.

He brings this same quality to this engaging set of personal essays.

Principled as a person, Clay knows his mind and relishes the sharing of it: what he can’t abide (hokum and humbug) and what he likes and loves (strong hot coffee, baseball).

Reading his introduction to this passionate collection of opinion pieces, I was at first afraid, as he straightens out what in our society does not need labeling as dangerous to our well-being (eggs) and what cries out to be labeled as dangerous (reality TV), that my friend had joined the company of curmudgeons who look at the world and their times and behold it all as folly. But not so; a wise, kind spirit suffuses these pieces. Whether writing of a first date and a father’s counsel or of dear kind old Aunt Minnie who cared for whoever came to her until she passed at 92 or of the first-novel author suffering through a lonely “book signing,” Clay Reynolds is not only forthright but also humane and humorous as he shares his experiences with a reader whose intelligence he respects.

And pulls you right into them. His appreciation of coffee, its modes and occasions, is definitive. And here is one of the best treatment of writers I’ve seen—those who go around thinking of themselves as writers and never write, one-book writers, affected writers, and the steady ones who tough the course. To say nothing—well, quite a bit—of the phenomenon of the Urban Myth (which of course is mostly rural).

A lively, rewarding collection. Take it with a good hot cup of Joe.

—Marshall Terry,

Author of The Memorialist

PREFACE:

WARNING: THIS BOOK COULD BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH

“A man’s own observation,

what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of

is the best physic to preserve health.”

—Francis Bacon

Not long ago, I read—and not without some alarm—that the federal government is taking action to require a warning label on—eggs. At first, I couldn’t quite believe it. I mean, the “incredible, edible egg” is the most fundamental of foods. Nothing could be more perfect; nothing could be simpler. You can boil it, fry it, scramble it, poach it, coddle it, bake it. It’s the most versatile of foods—most vegetarians will even eat one—and it’s mostly good for you. At least I thought so. But now, I learn, an egg is potentially “harmful to your health.”

Now, I’m aware that any number of foods we commonly spend way too much money for at the supermarket carry warning labels. Poultry and pork, fish as well as many beef cuts come with a standardized label advising the consumer to pay attention to “Safe Handling” rules. These include thoroughly washing both hands and utensils as well as cooking vessels prior to and after touching the very foodstuff that we’re planning to ingest, to be alert to correct cooking temperatures, and to make sure to properly refrigerate or freeze all leftovers. Similar or even direr cautions are at least implied in the standardized list of ingredients that the government demands be posted in tiny, almost illegible font on all food products we consume. (Curiously, no such warnings are required on fast-food. One should expect that a sign on the door of a chain food emporium might read, “Warning. The grossly overpriced and prefabricated victuals you’re about to consume contain almost no nutritional value but are packed with calories, fat, and other potentially harmful but tasty additives designed to make you swell up like a bullfrog in mating season.”)

Such cautionary labeling makes sense when you’re dealing with canned or processed meats such as the American hotdog or the ever-reliable-in-a-midnight-snack-pinch can of Vienna Sausages, which, my vegetarian daughter assures me, contain ingredients that would revolt a buzzard if the feathered diner could read them; but one does have to wonder if such warnings are necessary on a box of saltines (ingredients: flour, water, salt) or package of frozen green beans (ingredients: green beans, water), orange juice (ingredients: orange juice), a carton of milk (ingredients: milk), or common dairy products such as cheese and butter. Even a loaf of bread—that staff of life commodity—contains a full list of ingredients that, when combined with other warnings, utterly ruins the unparalleled indulgence of a bologna sandwich on white with mayo. Tuna fish, deviled ham, bacon, and even sardines have all been branded with cautionary revelations, much to the detriment of American Epicureanism.

Such notices might be useful to dieters, naturalists, and the odd hypochondriac. There is no doubt that they prevent cancer and complications during pregnancy. They probably prevent vast epidemics of gastroenteritis, indigestion, dyspepsia, as well as guilt-free satisfaction. But warnings on eggs? Are they necessary?

Some people’s cholesterol levels forbid the ingestion of henfruit, but even they must admit that it’s pretty hard to abuse an egg in some manner that would be dangerous. I have heard of folks who inadvertently got a piece of shell in their eyes or stuck in their throats, but I should think such cases are rare. A rotten egg announces itself sulfurously, so there’s small chance that anyone would eat a bad one. The government, however, apparently thinks that even a farm fresh egg represents a sufficiently significant danger to the general population to warrant a stern warning.

This leads me to the suspicion that the federal government may not have enough important stuff to do. God knows, they’re not overworked in the area of international affairs and domestic concerns such as promoting peace, relieving the trade deficit, or writing a tax code an ordinary MENSA member can understand. I’m coming around to the opinion that the only thing in our society that really needs a warning label is the government. It strikes me that almost everything government does is harmful to somebody somewhere, and usually, the harm comes from the proper, rather than the improper use of it.

The business of affixing warning labels to almost everything we eat or use seems to be a sign of illogical extremes if not just plain old “make work.” Perhaps it’s time for somebody to say “cut it out.” Maybe we should admit that it shouldn’t take a college degree for a person to cook and eat an egg in comparative safety and comfort. A teenager who is otherwise too inept to pick up his room or take out the garbage can do it. Actually, as has been demonstrated in televised demonstrations, a monkey can do it. To my knowledge, no monkey, not even a battery of laboratory test monkeys, has been harmed by eating eggs.

Monkeys also eat fruits and nuts. So can people. Is it possible that an orange or a pecan might also be harmful to one’s health? My guess is that the government has already commissioned a study of this likelihood. It would not surprise me to find out that some research institute somewhere has been given millions of tax dollars to conduct experiments and issue a report. Research institutes have to have something to do, and they’re chock full of laboratory animals eager to be tested. Doubtless, in a few short years, every peanut we buy at a ball game will come with a tiny label: Ingredients: Nuts; and every banana we select for our morning’s healthful bowl of bran flakes (Ingredients are listed in about two or three micro-font column inches and include items with syllables such as “xtrose,” “ethylene,” “oroform,” “dio,” “mono,” and “euro” and words such as “processed,” “enhanced,” “reduced,” “hydrogenated,” “laminated,” “galvanized,” and “undercoated”) will contain a label: Ingredients: Banana.

###

The real question about warning labels, though, is whether or not they do what they’re intended to do, which is not only to inform but also to keep us from doing the wrong thing. The first such printed prohibitions I ever remember seeing were on mattresses: the famous “do not remove this tag under penalty of law” tag. That was a warning with some teeth in it. I have no idea why that tag is so important to what is today never called a “mattress” but has been renamed a “sleep system,” but I can assure you that every piece of bedding in my house still has its tag intact. So do a number of throw pillows and even the dog’s bed. I don’t have any idea what the penalty for removal might be, but I don’t want to risk arrest by the Sleep System Police, which is, I think, a sub-bureau of the FBI or Homeland Security. If I removed one, I might wind up in prison in Cuba, which officially doesn’t exist, according to the government.

The next warning labels that caught my attention were, naturally, on cigarettes. The “harmful to your health” signal that came out in the late 1960s seemed ridiculous to me, or at least redundant. From the time I was fourteen, my mother had been telling me that cigarettes would stunt my growth. Now, at nearly sixty, I stand just about 6’ tall and weigh none of your damned business; I don’t think they did. I do believe that smoking can cause a variety of dread diseases in laboratory animals, of course. Most of these are catalogued on every pack of smokes I buy. I do know, because it’s a widely publicized fact, that if when some research institute somewhere hooked up a mouse to a machine that forced it to breathe cigarette smoke constantly for twelve-hundred seventy-two straight months—with time off for a sip of coffee or maybe a cold beer—he developed cancer and heart disease and emphysema, and there were complications with his pregnancy. No one wants a dread disease, and certainly no one wants a complicated pregnancy. But I truly don’t think anyone was ever discouraged from smoking because of the warning label.

Other warning signs have been around for a long time. Perhaps the first one in history appears in Dante’s Inferno as the inscription over the gate to Hell. It reads: “All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here.” Like most warning signs, it was put up by the government (something confirmed by the awkward syntax), and like most, it was largely ignored, not only by the average sinner bent on eternal damnation, but by Dante’s narrator, as well. It was meant to frighten any sinners who showed up and demanded entrance, although it seems to me that if they wound up there in the first place, it was probably too late for a warning label to discourage them from coming right on in.

More familiar to most Americans are warning signs on streets and highways; by and large, they are ignored. Posted speed limits are regarded as humorous suggestions for the most part; cautions about wet pavement, icy bridges, and steep grades are generally considered to be replacements for wittier reminders that used to greet motorists:

HARDLY A DRIVER

IS NOW ALIVE

WHO PASSED ON HILLS

AT NINTY-FIVE

BURMA SHAVE

That was a warning with some wisdom behind it. In spite of contemporary replacement warning signs, drivers often take curves at ninety-five, or at least at seventy, even when the sign clearly advises that twenty-five miles per hour is the maximum safe speed. The same thing’s true of exit ramps and parking lot speed limits. People tend to take school zone speed warnings more seriously, though; from time to time, they obey red lights and a few other cautions, especially in areas with a vigilant constabulary eager to increase the city’s revenues. That’s because, like mattress tag removal, a traffic violation is backed up by “penalty of law.” A hefty ticket can certainly be harmful to one’s pocketbook if not to one’s health.

This may be a path the government should investigate more thoroughly. Perhaps we should start fining people who ignore all warning signs. Eat an egg, get slapped with a fifty-dollar fine; smoke a cigarette, pay twenty bucks. Drink a glass of chardonnay while pregnant, add MSG to a plate of sesame chicken, fail to wear safety goggles and heavy work boots while using a power trimmer, use a 100-watt bulb in a 60-watt lamp, put gasoline in a glass container, or use a telephone in a thunderstorm, pony up a C-note for Uncle Sam. If our government and its bureaus are going to spend all this money to warn us about these things—particularly about things only a brainless cretin would try in the first place—we should be forced to abide by them or suffer the consequences. There should be a stiff penalty for flying in the face of sound laboratory-tested evidence. Just think of all the animals that have been sacrificed to prove that these dangers exist.

###

The government has been busy in its assembly of warnings, especially in the last few decades. Almost everything we do has some potential danger that we need to know about. One of the first was our use of saccharin. People were happily substituting this chemical sweetener in place of refined sugar because somebody somewhere decided that sugar was harmful to one’s health. (Not incidentally, our government also decided to boycott Cuban sugar, one of its more decisive moves that, like most government moves, was ineffective, except to raise the cost of sugar to American consumers, most of whom didn’t know—or care—where Cuba was in the first place and who, in the second place, were satisfied with saccharin.) Anyway, saccharin worked; it helped keep unwanted pounds off fat people and anxiety levels down among those who liked a bit of sweetness to their morning cup of Joe or bottled soft drink. Then some scientific institute somewhere spent a whole bunch of government money and discovered that if a laboratory rat ate sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of saccharin at one sitting, he would develop cancer. Or maybe he would have complications during pregnancy. Of course, sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of saccharin represented something like ten thousand times the average human’s consumption of the product in a seventy-year period; and anyone who eats sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of anything at one sitting probably deserves to get sick. But we had to be careful, so saccharin also started carrying a warning label.

That was more than fifty years ago. Now, almost everything comes with a warning label, even things that probably don’t need any cautionary admonishments at all. Take guns, for example. If you buy a handgun, say a .38 Special, you will find in the box a slip of paper that reads: “Discharge of this firearm can result in injury or even death.” Well, one would hope so. It is, after all, a pistol. It’s only practical function (other than to make the user feel as if his penis is five times its ordinary size) is to visit injury or death on someone toward whom it’s pointed. If it didn’t, then it would be a disappointment to the shooter; actually, if it didn’t, the result could be injury or even death to the shooter, particularly if the shooter was a law enforcement officer throwing down on, say, an alleged bank robber, or possibly a sleep system tag remover. What kind of person would want a pistol that would fail to cause injury or even death? I’m the sort of person who doesn’t want to cause anyone any injury or death, and I’m content with the anatomy I was born with, so I don’t buy handguns; but if I did, I would hope they’d do what they’re supposed to do, whether they’re used properly or not.

Still, the march for warnings continues. Not long ago, I received a power drill for Father’s Day. Right on the front of the owner’s manual, in huge block letters, I was informed that “use of this product under water can result in possibly deadly shock or severe injury.” I am willing to accept the probability that someone somewhere wants to drill something under water, but one would presume that such a person would be familiar with tools for underwater use. How often, I wonder, does some gomer grab his standard power drill and head out for the nearest lake or river, eager to get in a little submerged carpentry before supper? Is this warning really necessary?

Apparently so. Today, warning labels about the use of products in water are found on all kinds of things: plasma screen television sets, CD and DVD players, electric hedge clippers, even computers. Alarm clocks, cordless phones, flashlights, exercise treadmills, ceiling fans, and blood-pressure monitoring machines all arrive in packaging carrying stern warnings against use under water. This suggests that millions of Americans buy these products and immediately start looking for a hot tub to dive into to try them out. Perhaps the only thing stopping them are the warning labels.

Of course, the labels aren’t there for the consumer. They’re there for the manufacturer who fears being sued by the bereaved family of some idiot who actually thought that sending and receiving faxes from an inflatable floatie in the backyard pool was a good idea. We are a litigious society, and people will sue at the drop of a hot cup of coffee, as we have learned. The courts have demonstrated that if a person is not warned that stupid behavior might result in injury or death, then the injured or dead party is indemnified from responsibility for whatever happens to him.

Where will this all lead? We already have child-proof cigarette lighters and medicine bottles, mandatory bicycle helmets, and headlights that come on automatically, even in daylight. Many vehicles will not start unless the driver’s foot is on the brake and the car is in PARK. (The doors on my car lock automatically when the car is in motion, and some models automatically put your seatbelt on for you when you shut the door.) We have mandatory shoulder harnesses and airbags, each installed to protect us from injury or death; each is accompanied by a strict warning that misuse could result in injury or death. That sort of seems like a trade-off. The sun visor in my truck is plastered with warnings about trying to tow something without a proper hitch and driving at excessive speed when using four-wheel drive on an unstable surface, even though my vehicle doesn’t have four-wheel drive and I almost never leave the highway, as my tires came with warnings about driving them off the road. The owner’s manual is full of cautions about the use of the seat recliner, the steering wheel adjuster, the electric windows, the hood latch, the emergency brake, and most every other part on the car. There are also warnings about trying to drive under water. About the only thing on a car that doesn’t have a warning about proper use of is the car itself. Ironically, that’s the most commonly misused item in the equation.

Bicycles and roller skates, scooters and snow and water skis come with stern cautions about the perils of misuse. My lawnmower has a sign on it that advises me to keep hands and feet away from it if it’s running, a caution that, if observed, makes cutting the grass impossible to do, which, I confess, is fine by me. I also am cautioned against using it under water. A bag of top soil I was generously spreading around our tomato patch carries an advisory against “handling the contents without gloves”—I’m trying to grow vegetables in this stuff, so I checked the label for a “list of ingredients.” It read: “Dirt.” Even coffee pots and toasters and microwave ovens arrive with commanding admonitions not to place them in certain locations or use under certain conditions, such as a loss of electrical power or—again—under water. When was the last time you whipped up supper while soaking in a kids’ wading pool during a rolling blackout?

I find that many cooking utensils such as ordinary skillets and pots are accompanied by warnings, as well. I recently purchased a new spatula that carried a caution not to attempt to “overburden the torque” of the handle for fear it might snap off and injure me when the food I was lifting was catapulted to my face. It said nothing about use with eggs, which is somewhat discomforting, since eggs, all by themselves, now constitute a clear and present danger to consumers.

Kids’ plastic wading pools come with warnings, too, as do most toys—this seems remarkably useless for those items designed for preschoolers. If the toys arrive in the mail, the excelsior that pads them from breakage has warnings posted all over it. I noticed a football had a warning label that suggested “misuse could cause injury,” which I decided must pertain to the sport, not the ball. I even have a couple of board games (including the time-honored Scrabble) that have inserts cautioning me to keep game pieces away from my eyes and out of my mouth or ear. This is a disappointment, as hiding extra vowels under my tongue has been a standard part of my winning strategy for years.

When my son played baseball, his batting helmet also had a warning stenciled on the inside cautioning against “misuse.” How, I wondered, could one misuse a batting helmet? I guess he could take it off and throw it at the umpire in a fit of pique over a disputed call; but otherwise, I was flummoxed. His glove carried no such warning. This may well have been an oversight.

I recently replaced a toilet in one of our bathrooms. The “bathroom appliance” (that’s what you call a toilet, these days) came with a stiff warning, cautioning me that “Misuse of this Product Can Result in Serious Injury.” I paused to consider before bolting it to the floor. How, I wondered, can anyone “misuse” a toilet? I remember reading once about a lady in Fort Worth who chased her husband around their mobile home park with the top of their toilet’s water tank. She was intent on braining him with it if she ever caught up to him, which she didn’t. I suppose that constitutes “misuse.” But I understood that the porcelain piece was handier than a hammer or a baseball bat; frankly, I think that, as the proverbial “blunt instrument,” a toilet tank’s top was probably not the item of choice, since those suckers are heavy and hard to grip. Hammers and baseball bats also come with warnings about “misuse,” by the way; they might have discouraged her, if she stopped to read them.

Schools and their classes carry warning labels. Pupils are admonished that bad behavior and inappropriate dress can result in suspension or expulsion. University students are officially advised that failure to attend class or turn in assignments on time or at all “may result in grade penalty” [italics mine]. Credit cards, which are cheerfully and enthusiastically offered to people with no income at all, arrive with pages of fine print detailing the horrors that will be visited on anyone who even thinks about missing or being late with a payment. Even mail order catalogues carry notations that not all advertised merchandise may be available and that prices are subject to change without notice.

###

Many things should carry warning labels, but don’t; or they advise us to be wary of the wrong dangers. Even though cautions are put on movies, popular music, video games, and some television programming, they only warn us about harsh language, violence, nudity, and sexual explicitness, stuff that most kids can observe around the house or at school every day. Indeed most of them can’t avoid observing it, and often, at both places, but we are worried that they might see or hear it through a monitor or speaker, as well. There are, though, no warnings about the possibility that watching such mindless gunk as reality television and game shows and C-Span might cause a numbing of thought processes to the extent that originality or creativity might be permanently impaired; if indulgence is excessive, one’s muscles might atrophy to the consistency of a hot bowl of mush. A warning is, I think, something that especially should appear on televised sports events, especially football games, golf, and NASCAR races. Entire colonies of laboratory animals have likely been reduced to drooling catatonia because of excessive exposure to much of the drivel that passes for televised entertainment these days. Thus far, though, no warning labels have been issued.

Marriage, now that I think about it, probably should carry a warning label. About seventy-five percent of all marriages end in divorce; the rest end in death. Overall, it’s a low percentage move, even when it’s used properly. As a nuptial couple approaches the government licensing bureau to obtain their permit to marry, they should be confronted with relevant warnings: “This action, if improperly taken, could result in frustration, anger, and general feelings of entrapment and helplessness as well as unpleasant obligation and mutual dissatisfaction; side effects could include adultery, physical or psychological abuse or injury—even untimely death—alienation of friends and immediate family (especially in-laws), mental cruelty, abandonment, financial ruin, exposure of embarrassing secrets, revelations of inadequacy, rejection, and depression, or children.” There might even be a coda advising against serious discussions following intercourse. Smoking silently in the dark might be recommended as a safer alternative.

Children definitely should come with warning labels, as well: “Warning: This child will be potentially subject to a variety of illnesses, developmental short-comings, inability to meet unreasonable expectations, and failure to be fully appreciative. There’s a chance it will also wind up ugly and not very smart and may never leave home. Maintenance expenses will advance in proportion to age, and demands for time and energy will be burdensome to the point of bankruptcy and exhaustion. If not properly attended, reared, supported, educated, and loved, it may break your heart and probably will anyway.”

Children most usually are the result of sexual intercourse of one sort of another, and sex, of course, does carry warnings. Even though we are bombarded with ads for pharmaceutical products that will increase, revive, lengthen, even develop stunted, forgotten, or inadequate sexual response—or create sexual initiative where none existed before—each with a full thirty-second disclaimer that the drug may have startling side-effects (“Erections lasting more than two days are abnormal and require medical attention,” one ad says. I should think so.)—we are encouraged to brow-beat our doctors into prescribing them for us. Otherwise, we may be in danger of an unfulfilled life. Like laxatives, underarm deodorant, foot-odor products, shaving implements, and remedies for incontinence, indigestion, ugly toenails, dull teeth, hair loss, and bad breath, these ads assure us that the use of these potentially dangerous products (and avoidance of all their possible side effects) correctly will result in all of us donning comfortable yet fashionable casual wear, sitting next to some handsome or beautiful partner in an Adirondack chair on a sturdy deck overlooking a gorgeous sunset over a shimmering body of water while we sip Mai Tais and contemplate buying sailboats or luxury cars. To have such a fulfilling experience is clearly worth the risk of abiding by the warning labels.

Of course, the same results can be achieved by imbibing the correct brand of beer, or so we’re assured by the breweries, even though every can of beer sold boasts a warning label advising the drinker that the beverage contained within might cause birth defects and could impair ability to drive a vehicle or operate heavy machinery, activities beer drinkers regularly try to do. To date, there has been no laboratory evidence, however, that any tipplers have ever read one of these labels, let alone been discouraged from drinking a beer because of it. Most, actually, see the liquid they’re drinking as a far more reliable avenue to sexual fulfillment with that beautiful or handsome partner than taking some Nutra-Sweet-coated pill. After all, there’s still wisdom in the adage: “Candy’s dandy, but liquor’s quicker.”

Thanks to the government, though, more serious warnings do keep us charier of unrestricted sexual activity than lessons in morality ever did. We are now aware that the misuse of casual sexual congress can lead to terrible disease and death. Even condom machines in convenience store men’s rooms caution, “Misuse of this product can result in the transmission of infection or pregnancy.” I’m not sure how one misuses a condom. I’m also not sure how one “transmits” pregnancy, but there you have it. The signs say little about what might happen if the product isn’t used at all, but most condom brands promise sterling—even phenomenal results—if one is employed with a willing partner. Presumably, if one uses such a product, one will have an experience worth writing home to Mother about. Lamentably, the condom machine labels offer no advice on how to acquire a willing partner; happily, though, such information is usually scrawled on various walls surrounding the dispenser. No warnings are posted there, though.

It’s noteworthy that no cautions concerning sex have any admonitions about having intercourse under water. The same cannot be said for any number of electronic or battery-operated accessories marketed to heighten the sexual experience or even to be used when none of the restroom wall advertisements pan out. Such devices are, I’m reliably informed, clearly labeled with warnings regarding submersed use.

###

Another thing that doesn’t carry a warning label and that probably should is money. This, I believe, should merit the federal government’s full and immediate attention, for certainly the “misuse” of this product has frequently resulted in unwanted, even disastrous consequences. Money has led to unnecessary wars, depressions, recessions, and taxes, for example. It also leads to graft, corruption, and scandal. Look what it’s done to major league baseball, for one thing, or popular music, or the oil industry. Principally, it’s the only thing about us that the government is interested in; and if we happen to come into a little bit of it by virtue of labor or luck, the government is Johnny-on-the-spot to take most of it away. This leads to miserable frustration and an unhealthy attitude.

On a personal level, the improper use of money routinely causes embarrassment and humiliation; it often motivates dangerous behavior, and if it’s misused frequently, it can result in destitution. It can wreck romance and destroy family harmony; it can also result in ridiculous displays of opulence and outrageous self-indulgence. People sometimes hoard it, making them mean and miserly; other people use it lavishly to gain unwarranted power and influence. Some people abuse it in attempts to buy friends or even lovers, and some misuse it to get rid of friends and lovers or even family members who are no longer wanted. If you stop to think about it, much of the misery in the world is caused by the improper use of money. Either there’s too much of it or not nearly enough. Trying too hard to get more can lead to “serious injury,” or at least a stretch in the calaboose, while failing to have enough can cause someone to sicken and die. But money carries no warning. Instead, it reminds us that we trust in God.

Religion also carries no warning label, although it’s probably responsible for the rest of the serious problems in human history. Like most other things, if it’s used in a manner other than that for which it’s intended, the results can be devastating. Entire nations have even been destroyed because of it, whole populations wiped out entirely. Perhaps churches, synagogues, and mosques—as well as ashrams and temples, missions, shrines, tabernacles, oracles and altars—should carry warning signs. “Misuse of this faith can result in serious injury or even death.”

That may be futile, though. Much as it’s been marketed, packaged, and sold, as much harm as it’s done, people still insist on their right to misuse it without “penalty of law.” I somehow doubt that any sort of warning would stop them. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me to see such a caution posted about it. No matter how much we believe in the rule of common sense and practical wisdom, there’s always some religious zealot out there ready to do something stupid designed to cause injury or death, and then to blame someone else when it doesn’t work out. And we are assured that religion was around long before there were such protective agencies as governments, even before there was money. Some would say that it’s been around even before the egg.

Still, in the matter of the egg, I wonder if the federal government hasn’t gone too far. The point of the warning label on the basic egg is to caution people that the contents—yolk and white—might well be contaminated with deadly salmonella and that the egg needs to be fully cooked before consuming. Now, I had an Uncle Bob who used to like to have a raw egg in his beer, and I have seen many “hangover remedies” that called for ingesting a raw egg. In Rocky, Sylvester Stallone drinks a health food concoction that combined several raw eggs with some other equally disgusting ingredients before running five-hundred-sixty-three miles without throwing up; and I know that drugstore soda fountains used to offer the option of a raw egg in vanilla milkshakes back in the days when milkshakes were handmade, not squirted out of some high-tech machine that also carries warning labels all over it about using them, especially under water. But apart from these oddities and antiquities, who in his right mind eats a raw egg? I mean, how many people vault out of bed every morning, race to the fridge, and wolf down a couple of ice cold eggs straight from the shell?

Well, somebody besides Sylvester Stallone must. Because our government will soon add to the basic price of eggs by demanding warning labels be printed on the cartons, if not on the actual eggs themselves. I have no doubt that some government agency somewhere has commissioned some research institute somewhere to investigate this by using a whole bunch of laboratory animals and a pile of tax dollars; the best agricultural minds in the country are at this moment probably stuffing raw eggs by the tens of thousands down the gullets of laboratory monkeys, mice, and rats, while at the same time trying figure out how to breed a chicken that will add the label to the shell before she lays it. This would cut down on production costs, for sure, and it would ensure uniformity.

I hope we can look forward to a time when politicians and government bureaucrats will carry warning labels. Now, there’s a thought. “Warning: Taking this individual or bureau seriously can be harmful to one’s perception of reality and faith in reason. The main side effect is gross indifference and complacent acquiescence. Continuing belief in this individual or bureau can result in disillusionment, destruction of ideals, and possibly revolution. It will for sure result in economic woe, inequitable law, and specious rationalization, as well as self-serving aggrandizement and appeasement of the highest bidding lobbyist. Other common side-effects include excessive pork barrel expenditures and cuts in vital public services with a commensurate rise in taxes and large pay increases for the government leaders.” That’s a label I could believe in.

For all these reasons, this volume of essays carries a warning that, if not properly used, the contents could be harmful. That’s because, innately and at bottom, an essay is an opinion; and opinions, as we’re told, are like . . . well, like eyebrows. Everyone has a set, and in most cases they tend to get unruly if they’re not properly trimmed. Unfortunately, no one is less bothered by overgrown eyebrows than the person wearing them, and no one is less bothered by the potential misuse of untrimmed opinions than the person expressing them. They’re not automatically harmful to your health, but if misused or misapplied, they can cause serious consternation.

The best way to trim opinions is to use them properly, by assessing them, thinking about them, and then either agreeing or disagreeing with them. I’d love for my set of opinions to find agreement with everyone else’s; it’s possible, though, even likely, that many who read these will not agree with them. None will cause injury or death, though. There’s no government ordinance in danger of violation here, and they can be used both above and below the surface of any body of water. I’m in no danger of anyone commissioning a research institute to investigate them or of wasting any tax dollars in presenting them; in fact, the biggest danger is that they are merely inconsequential. But importantly, no laboratory animal was harmed in their conception or expression.

My fondest hope is that a reader might find a thought or two that will be worth contemplating. Perhaps a chuckle might arise here, a sober thought there. I cannot imagine that my opinions are right most of the time, or even some of the time. If that were true, I’d be inclined to start my own religion. In the meantime, though, I’ll just hope for the best, find a handy body of water, and maybe cook up an egg—before it’s too late.

LET’S HAVE ANOTHER CUP OF COFFEE!

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

—T.S. Eliot

I don’t remember my first cup of coffee. That may not be remarkable on the surface of it, but somehow, it seems striking that that particular memory escapes me. I remember my first drink (back porch, Teen Canteen, Quanah, Texas, 1963—a sip from a half-pint of Thunderbird wine, shared by five guys, one of whom was immediately sick and never drank again). I remember my first “real” steak (Fort Worth, Farmer’s Daughter, 1966—until then, I thought all steak was served beaten, battered, and fried); my first tailor-made cigarette (back seat, Billy Hugh Price’s 1964 GTO—white vinyl, 8-track cassette, 428 cubic inches, bored and stroked, four-barrel carb and twin glass packs, Hurst Shifter and a posi-track rear end—“There’s nothing like a Lark,” I said). I also remember my first sexual encounter (none of your business—let’s not get carried away). But I don’t remember my first cup of coffee. It seems that I’ve always drunk coffee.

Coffee is my best friend, my early morning companion, my late night sentry. Some days, I drink it constantly, and I’ve started no day without it for as long as I can remember. It has staid me on birth nights, on death watches; it has been my sole companion in lonely bus terminals, crowded train stations, and distant airports. It has seen me safely down ribbons of slick, winding highway when sleep nagged my eyes from the road. I have drunk it from china, porcelain, and tin, glass, plastic, Styrofoam and stainless steel. I’ve had it perked, brewed, dripped, and boiled. I’ve sat at a table in New Orleans and sipped bitter chickory while loutishly dressed fools paraded in front of St. Louis Cathedral. I’ve shouldered with it beside a diner’s counter in New York’s Time Square on a frigid New Year’s morning when traffic snarled and crowds pressed against each other like Eliot’s dead undone. I’ve sipped it with truckers along interstates in greasy cafes where the food was always good, and I’ve stood with stamping feet at concession stands and blown a cooling breath over its steamy ebony while my children played their games beneath a blue norther’s sky. It’s skated the black-iced glaze of Philadelphia with me, taught me the wonders of Canada’s Rockies, and helped me hold at bay the pounding memory of last night’s fiesta in the desert mountains of Mexico. I’ve savored its inky richness while contemplating a placid lake, and nervously slurped it while hurricane clouds boiled overhead. I’ve drunk it while sailing and hiking, while fishing and hunting, while studying theatre notices in London and while rocking across the storm-tossed Irish Sea. I’ve sipped it in the fanciest of hotels and the crudest of campsites.

I’ve paid as much as five dollars for a cup in a big city restaurant, and as little as a nickel in a roadside diner. I’ve accepted free coffee from the thermoses of strangers, and I’ve shared a half a cup with a friend when that’s all there was and all there was going to be.

I’ve read the best newspapers of the world while sipping coffee, written reams with a smoking cup beside my keys, talked with the best of my friends, fenced with the worst of my enemies, celebrated victory, mourned failure, pondered accomplishment, nursed regret, all in the gentle steam of a coffee cup. I can’t imagine a day without it.

It seems odd, then, that I can’t recall my first cup.

I do recall when I was very young my mother prepared coffee for me. She would dump in about half a cup of cream, two or three teaspoons of sugar, and fill the rest of the mug with her strong brew. Eventually, the coffee outweighed the cream; soon, the cream disappeared altogether when granulated substitutes started replacing it on coffee bar counters. I never could get the powder to dissolve. Nothing’s worse than lumpy coffee.

I still like a “little sugar,” about half a teaspoon, in my coffee—and only in the first cup—but truthfully, I do that more out of habit than need. Coffee requires tradition. But when it’s fresh, hot, and strong, it doesn’t require anything but itself—and maybe a smoke.

People who say that coffee is bad for you are Meddlers. They’re the sort who lie awake nights trying to figure out how to spoil everyone else’s pleasure. They’re the sort who serve broiled chicken breast to perfectly innocent guests who never did them any harm. They’re the sort who put beans in chili and ketchup on hamburgers. They’re out to ruin everything that’s good in the world. My advice is to avoid them if you want to enjoy yourself.

But the subject is coffee. One of my earliest memories is of my father drinking coffee at our kitchen table. He usually wore khakis and an undershirt. He’d sit there stirring an ice cube into coffee so hot it would take the finish off the table’s surface had he spilled it, so strong it almost didn’t require the cup to hold it. Next to the cup was a pack of Luckys, next to the smokes the morning paper. It was his habit to rise early on days when he hadn’t worked the night before, then sit there and watch the West Texas sun come up, glance at the news, the scores. Sometimes I would come in and find him there, smoking, sitting quietly, reading a bit, and puzzling over whatever problems faced him. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even speak to me. He would slowly spoon an ice cube from a glass of water into his cup, stir it until it dissolved. Then he would sip it. I never saw him use the spoon to taste the coffee. He always just sipped it from the cup.

He liked his coffee strong. One scoop of grounds per cup.

As I grew older, I started getting up and having coffee and a smoke with him. I think we somehow came to understand one another, at least a little better than usual. We never fought over coffee. That, too, was a kind of tradition.

When I eventually became a father, I followed the pattern, and I still do: rise early, pour my cup of coffee, go off by myself and drink and smoke and look over the newspaper, and think. It helps clear my mind, gets me ready to face the day. It’s a lot easier on my knees than jogging.

My children never joined me. My daughter didn’t drink coffee—it was bad for her, she was told in school. Meddlers. But my wife still looks forward to our morning coffee, even when we don’t talk very much. It’s a nice time, and coffee makes it that way.

When my son was in high school, he got up and worked out in the early morning when it was cool. I taught him to make coffee so it would be ready when I rose. He did pretty well with it, but he didn’t drink it. It wasn’t appealing to him. He made it stronger than he should have, but I didn’t mind. It reminded me of my father.

Today, people—especially Americans—don’t like their coffee strong. They prefer it weak, and they prefer it tepid, pre-ground and slowly dripped out, like their politics. Almost no one perks coffee any more. They brew it, drip it, sometimes make a concentrate of it and add it to warm water. That’s not coffee. That’s something else. Strong opinions require strong coffee. They eschew nicety. So does strong coffee. It’s not for the faint of heart, not for the faint of mind.

I know people who drink soft drinks—cola and the like—instead of coffee. They’re just after the caffeine, you see. But they’re cheating themselves. People don’t sit down to share a Coke or contemplate life’s mysteries over a Dr. Pepper. They merely drink them, then forget them. Coffee is a memory. Cola is a convenience.

What makes coffee appealing, of course, is the aroma, not the taste, or the appearance. If it’s any good—and if it’s strong—it’s bitter and black and very hot. What could be less appealing in a beverage? So, it’s the smell.

Coffee also has sound. There is no music in the world that is as startlingly pleasant as the sound of fresh coffee being poured into a cup. There’s a kind of liquid crackle to it, if such a thing is possible. It can awaken the sleepiest dreamer, enliven the drowsiest dinner guest, enjoin the most reluctant in conversation. That sound is a promise, and no other beverage duplicates it. The sound of coffee is the sound of life, a herald’s call to a brighter future. The future might be suggested by tea’s leaves, but it’s guaranteed in coffee’s staccato melody.

Coffee is ecumenical. Anyone who has ever seen a western knows that. What’s the first thing a cowboy says to a stranger who rides up to his campfire? It’s always, “Want some coffee?” If the stranger accepts the coffee, then the audience knows that everything is going to be all right. If he doesn’t, watch out. Gunplay is soon to come.

Coffee is romantic. In a love story, if a guy meets a gal (sorry, I didn’t promise any political correctness here) he likes and wants to get to know her better, he says, “Hey, want to go get a cup of coffee?” If he says, “Hey, want to have a drink?” we know a great deal more about him—and her, if she accepts—than we might want to know (or approve of). But if they go for coffee, we know that nothing bad will happen. At the worst, they’ll lie awake all night and think about each other. What could be more romantic?

Coffee is a treatment for sleepiness, for drunkenness, for depression, and for anxiety. “Just relax, I’ll put some coffee on,” is a standard line in a million movies. It tells the audience that everything will be all right, the crisis will be diffused. Coffee is perking.

Coffee is family. Coffee in my childhood house was always perked, always strong, always hot, always fresh. We were Baptists, so there was no alcohol permitted (in view). But Baptists do drink coffee; it was the beverage of choice in our home, in our church, in our lives.

Some people drink hot tea, but that’s un-American. Tea is something you steep, then ice down to go with chicken-fried steak or barbeque. Hot tea is effete, elitist, aristocratic. Coffee is earthy, proletarian, democratic. When I was young, it made perfect sense to me that the revolting colonists would have destroyed British tea. The Sons of Liberty would never have chucked crates of Columbian Dark Roast overboard into Boston Harbor. Tea is cheap, but Yankee parsimony would have forbidden wasting so much coffee. The spirit of Juan Valdez stood sentry for the Boston Tea Party.

Tea is also brown, and thin, and lacking in character. It goes well with crumpets and doilies. “Strong tea” is a contradiction in terms. Tea is for lightweights. Coffee is for the earnest, the committed.

Coffee has nicknames—java, joe, mud, oil—and they change with the times. Tea is always—well, tea. Even the sound of it lacks character. Say them together: “Tea.” “Coffee.” One sounds like something you do in private; the other sounds like something you might want publicly to be. People have named dogs, sons and even daughters “Coffee.” There’s even a town in Kansas named Coffee. Who ever heard of anyone named for “Tea?” Coffee makes grounds and has substance. Tea leaves leaves and has only aftertaste.

Some people believe there’s philosophy in tea, and that may be true. But there’s wisdom in coffee. Given a choice, I’ll take wisdom. You can never have too much wisdom, and too much philosophy becomes confusing, sometimes dangerous.

###

My mother’s family often gathered at my great-great-aunt Minnie’s home. The single constant in all those get-togethers was coffee: gallons of it. Some of my uncles used cream, some of my aunts used sugar, but all of them wanted it perked, hot, dark and strong. They drank it for hours at a time, long into the night.

It was a kind of communal beverage, binding in its informality, its universality, its constancy. It went with everything they ate, but mostly it went with conversation. No one talked about the coffee, except to say, “I’ll put on a fresh pot,” or “Do you want some more?” It was a tie that bound a family together, stimulated conversation, prompted both laughter and tears. No one worried about caffeine in those days. They only worried if the coffee wasn’t hot and fresh.

In high school, coffee took on a special importance to me and to my friends. After we had driven around for hours and used up all of someone’s gas, we would go out to Dutch’s Cafe on Highway 287 and sit for some more hours, well into the early morning, and drink coffee. Then, a cup from Dutch’s “Bottomless Pot” was only a dime, and refills were free. We would sit for hours in one of those raggedy old booths and look out the dust-blown window at the traffic going by to Dallas and Denver and talk out our wonderings about the world away from there. While we talked, we swilled cup after cup of Dutch’s famous dark roast. We rarely ate anything, rarely had enough money for anything, and Dutch never asked us to leave. Our dreams, ambitions, speculations, and fears were all articulated there. They were fueled by coffee. They were strengthened by it, too.

Somewhere along the line, I became a “coffee snob,” but not in the way that sounds. I am not a purist. I merely want my coffee to taste like coffee. I have little patience with people who demand special things from their brews or think they have to be exotic to be any good. Nothing is worse than coffee that tastes like oranges, chocolate, hazelnuts, almonds, or some kind of flower. If people want those tastes, they should eat those things. If they want coffee, they should drink coffee. If they want both, they should eat those things with coffee. Trying to “dress up” coffee by making it taste like something else seems silly to me.

I’m also not much into espresso, café au lait, cappuccino, or latte. Espresso has the essence of coffee, but it lacks the familiar and democratic texture of the real thing. It’s also served in tiny cups and sells for too much. It’s just not natural, somehow, or satisfying. As for the others, well, if I want a milkshake, I’ll order a milkshake.

I was in a gourmet coffee shop recently, one of those chain outfits that are more common today than phone booths were in the past, although they’re far less useful. They must have had fifty different coffees available in bean and ground form. If you didn’t see what you wanted, they’d mix it up for you. I looked at the list for a long time, then I went to the counter. “I’d like a cup of coffee,” I said. “What kind?” he said. “Just coffee,” I said. “Make sure it’s fresh.”

He was bewildered. He started telling me in alphabetical order all the names of the coffees they sold. I stopped him when he got to the Ds. “I just want a cup of coffee,” I said. “Just plain, black, hot, coffee.”

He consulted with the manager then returned. “We don’t sell that here,” he said. “You need to go to a café for that.”

I did. And I didn’t regret it. His coffee was $3.75 a cup. The café only charged two bits, and refills were free. I’ll bet he didn’t give free refills with all his fancy coffees. But I’ll also bet it didn’t occur to him that café means coffee. His shop just meant fancy. Coffee isn’t fancy; it’s democratic, remember?

This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate a good cup of chicory now and then, or that I don’t like different kinds of coffee generally. But I don’t seek out these things on a regular basis. I too much enjoy the aroma, the taste, the heat and the overall experience of a plain old cup of truck-stop joe, made with cold water and perked until it’s almost—but not quite—boiling when it hits the lip, strong enough to lift the spirits, black enough to lighten the darkest night.

I also don’t think much of decaffeinated coffee. People who order “a cup of decaf” are the same sorts of people who eat “lite mayonnaise” and “chicken fajitas”, whatever that is. They say silly things like “hold the onions” and think a bowl of lettuce is a meal. I acknowledge that some people have health problems and have to eat this way, and I sympathize with them, but people who have those problems don’t choose to have them. So why do perfectly healthy people deprive themselves of real coffee? They may as well order colored water, heated and laden with sugar and cream. It achieves the same effect as a flour tortilla, which, I think, resembles cardboard with freckles. Coffee without caffeine isn’t coffee. You may as well have tea.

When I visit friends overnight, unless I know they are confirmed coffee people, my first stop is in the kitchen. I seek out their coffee maker (I’m not picky as to type) and then make sure that the color of the can is red—not green. If they have no red, I inquire about the distance to the nearest café and tell them I’ll be absent in the morning. “I have to have my coffee,” I say.

I’ll put up with your cats, endure your children, and stand outside in the rain and smoke. But I’m damned if I’ll drink decaf and call it coffee.

Coffee is addictive, of course. Caffeine is a drug. Drinking coffee is a vice, but it’s one of the more innocuous vices human beings share, which, I guess, is why I have trouble tolerating Meddlers who don’t approve of it. Switching totally to decaf might prevent some horrible thing from happening, but it somehow would negate the point of drinking coffee in the first place. People who drink decaf are cheating. They’re fooling themselves.

I feel the same way about people who drink (and serve) instant coffee. Instant coffee should be outlawed for use except in cases of extreme emergency, such as being confronted with decaf. Instant coffee forbids the ritual of preparing the pot, of measuring the grounds, of pouring the water, of waiting carefully for the moment when it’s ready, of savoring the first fresh cup of the morning.

Making a cup of instant coffee is too much like making tea. Drinking instant coffee is like believing politicians’ “sound bites” on TV. They’re handy, easy to digest, and rarely make a mess. But they rarely mean anything, either. Instant coffee is frequently lumpy—and bitter—as well. So are most politicians.

###

I don’t know much about the history of coffee. I do know that during the War Between the States, Union troops along the rivers of Northern Virginia would build tiny rafts and float coffee across the Potomac to their mortal enemies in exchange for Rebel tobacco. They understood the necessity of indulging such vices when faced with imminent death. I know that American soldiers in two world wars and Korea and Vietnam were provided with coffee as a “top priority” item from the Quartermaster Corps. Second only to arms and munitions, it was higher in priority than prophylactics and cigarettes; higher, even, than food. Armies may march on their stomachs, as the saying goes, but after they’ve hurried up and are waiting, they want their coffee. Without it, they might mutiny.

I’m not well-educated in the science of coffee. To be honest, I’m not all that interested. A few years ago I read that the coffee we buy has as many ground up cockroaches in it as it does ground up beans. If that’s true, I don’t want to know it. I like it the way it is, and I don’t want anybody fussing with it.

It’s enough for me that coffee is available. It’s served almost everywhere food and beverages are sold, and it can be bought in the smallest of groceries, the seediest of gas stations, the greasiest of greasy spoons. Sometimes that’s the best coffee around. Sometimes it’s the best because it’s the only coffee around. Many’s the night in my experience that the only coffee around was the best coffee.

Almost anyone can make coffee, particularly in the new drip makers that have directions printed on the lid. It’s hard to foul up coffee, but every coffee drinker knows where the best cup can be found in any city, and there’s no greater compliment to pay anyone than to say, “He/she makes a great cup of coffee.” Coffee making is not the province of any race, creed, or color. As I said, coffee is democratic.

Once I went with a group of young people to the mountains on a weekend hike. The first morning, they awoke to find me happily boiling coffee over the campfire in a regular pot. When my mixture threatened to spill over, I poured in cold spring water to settle the grounds. They were astonished, then skeptical, but they finally gave in. The aroma got to them, you see, the smell. They had never had coffee that hadn’t been perked, brewed, or dripped from some high-tech device. What I gave them was strong—too strong, really. But they drank it, and they pronounced it the best they’d ever had.

I doubt that it was. Coffee always tastes better outdoors. Besides, it was the only coffee around.

I may not remember my first cup of coffee, but I do remember my last. It was only a few minutes ago. I am sensitive to the fact of an emptying pot, and I am eager to be the first to pour from a fresh one. I find it to be an honorable vice, a pleasurable friend, and a solace in times when I’m alone and in need of contemplation. I also find it to be one of the few things I can share with people without being afraid of giving offense. Unless I smoke, of course.

I hope I shall always feel the way I do about coffee, and I hope the Meddlers leave it alone and spend their time finding things wrong with broccoli and tofu. I’m not sure why coffee is, only that it is, and that it’s one of the few constants in life that can always be counted on.

THE BOOK THAT SCARRY BUILT:

BEING IN PART A DISCOURSE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE ROLE OF CHILDREN IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

“When the first baby laughed for the first time,

the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about,

and that was the beginning of fairies.”

—J.M. Barrie

I hate Richard Scarry. More precisely, I hate Richard Scarry’s books. They are, I am convinced, born of an insidious intent: to drive parental readers insane with insipid inanity and irritating irrelevancy. Scarry doubtlessly takes a devious pleasure in concocting them and populating them with hundreds—thousands, it sometimes seems—of idiotic, vacuous characters engaged in a bedlam of moronic activities while wearing stupid smiles on their wide, lunatic faces. Their design, clearly, is to irk and vex a reader to the point of utter distraction. What I learned, though, is that, for a parent, they’re as unavoidable as dirty diapers, and they’re just as obnoxious.

You see, I once had this vision. As I anticipated the birth of our two children, I could see myself comfortably seated in an overstuffed chair, my offspring warmly wrapped in woolen nightclothes on my lap, snug, fuzzy slippers on their little feet, their eyes all aglow with fascination as I narrated tales of Mother Goose, Aesop, or—joy of joys!—Winnie the Pooh to them from heavy, leather-bound tomes lovingly removed from the oaken bookshelves of their rooms. Then, my vision continued, when they grew older—say three or four—we would graduate to children’s versions of the classical myths, to stories of Odysseus, Pegasus, and Jason and the Argonauts. I even located a volume of stories from Shakespeare for children to save for them when they were ready. Well, that was my vision.

Some years later, the average evening found me fixed between three-year-old Wesley and two-year-old Virginia, not on a comfortable chair, but on our broken-down old divan, covered with stains from childhood messiness, the only piece of furniture we owned that was large enough to accommodate all three of us and the mandatory presence of their collection of dolls, stuffed animals, blankets, and other companioning paraphernalia brought along to that period of time Virginia indelibly named, “Weadbook!”

Neither child is snugly wrapped in traditional nightclothes. Wesley sports an oversized tee-shirt emblazoned with the faded logo of the local university; Virginia is squeezed into an undersized pair of baby-doll pajamas that she steadfastly defends from consignment to the bottomless pit of the Goodwill bag. Both are fed and bathed, and neither is anywhere close to as weary and ready for the day to end as I am.

Their eyes are not aglow with fascination. Instead, if they’re not bickering with one another, they’re totally ignoring the tales I’m trying to read to them and digging their little noses into whatever other books have been selected for the night’s program. They frequently interrupt my droning with requests for water, juice, and information on topics I had no idea they were even aware of, all occasionally punctuated with a squabble about which book Daddy will read aloud to himself next.

There are no leather-bound volumes, either. Rather, the books of childish choice are dog-eared paperbacks, slashed and torn, often brought to me in pieces with whole sections missing. Any suggestion that they be thrown out and replaced by selections which might yet contain some semblance of plot or story is met with teary objections as if I’d proposed strangling the family pooch.

By far, their favorite books are those which have been “colored in” so much that half the narrative is obscured, have more than half their pages stuck together with some anonymous foodstuff, or have found their way into the toilet or bathtub more than once. Whole sentences are frequently obliterated by some tiny finger’s shredding. Not infrequently, information carefully offered by the author pertains to a picture on an opposing page that has long since been rendered pulp by diminutive demolitionists who suddenly are all eyes and ears and demand to know where the ducky, chicky, or lamby the narrative mentions has gone to.

Finally, the stories are not fascinating accounts of mythical beings and amazing creatures so dear to my childhood reading fantasies. They aren’t even the mildly entertaining formulae offered by the Muppets, the Sesame Street Gang, or even the media-born creatures from the movie studios of Warner Brothers or Disney. No. The favorite of favorites, the book of books, the primary selection for virtually every evening’s “Weadbook!” is at least one of the loathsome tales of Richard Scarry.

Books in Print lists dozens of volumes by this celebrated author of children’s literature. They come in all shapes and sizes from the extra-large, hardbound volumes to tiny paperbacks that will literally fit into a shirt pocket. Each boasts a different title; each offers a new approach to the same old stuff; and each is just like the others in several annoying ways designed to drive any parent to the brink of gibbering lunacy.

First of all there are the illustrations, both the kind and the number—especially the number. Scarry peoples his books with cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, mice, rabbits, worms, monkeys, and the odd hippo or rhino among other miscellaneous fauna. These characters are garbed in more or less human clothing—just enough costume to obscure the species in question and to elicit queries such as, “What kind of animal is that, Daddy?” at the rate of forty times per page. Not only are these weird creatures living in regular houses and performing all sorts of improbable chores and duties—and more often than not, botching the job with unimaginable stupidity—they are also surrounded by thirty or fifty drawings of other people-like animals who are doing even more inane and—to my way of thinking—irrelevant tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with anything the “main” characters are doing. In one book, for example, almost seventy-two humanoid-animals are engaged in at least two hundred activities around the Pig Family who, as usual, aren’t doing anything in the least remarkable or even logical.

Properly read, then, the typical Richard Scarry book takes about two hours per page to get through, that is, if the child/auditor is preliterate. If the parent/reader is confronted with an audience consisting of a toddler or preschooler, a few days might be added to that rate.

Thus, our evening “Weadbook!” sessions go something like this:

DADDY: [reading] “The Pig Family passes a construction site . . .”

WESLEY: What’s a construction site?

VIRGINIA: What’s that chicken doing, Daddy?

WESLEY: He’s driving a road-grader.

VIRGINIA: Where’s a wode-gwader?

WESLEY: He’s going to hit that doggie on the tricycle.

VIRGINIA: Where’s a wode-gwader?

DADDY: [indicating the page] Right there. No, I think he’ll miss the doggie.

WESLEY: Can doggies drive tricycles and road-graders?

VIRGINIA: Where’s a doggie?

DADDY: [pointing] Right there, Virginia. I don’t think doggies—

VIRGINIA: I don’t see a wode-gwader! Where’s the wode-gwader?

WESLEY: What’s that kitty doing? Is he going to ride the tricycle, too?

VIRGINIA: [growing frantic] Where’s the wode-gwader?

WESLEY: Is the kitty going to hit the doggie?

DADDY: There’s the road-grader, Virginia. What kit—

WESLEY: Is the kitty going to crash?

DADDY: No, I don’t think—

VIRGINIA: [delighted] Wode-gwader!

WESLEY: Why is that airplane upside down?

VIRGINIA: I want to see the doggie, [crying] Where’s the kitty?

DADDY: There’s the doggie, Virginia. The kitty—

VIRGINIA: Doggie!

WESLEY: What are the mice doing?

VIRGINIA: Where’s upside down?

DADDY: That’s an airplane. That’s upside down. The mice—

WESLEY: Where’s Goldbug?

DADDY: That’s another book—

VIRGINIA: Where’s Godbug? I want to see Godbug!

WESLEY: [patiently and wisely] That’s another book, Virginia.

DADDY: [hurriedly turning the page] Well, now the Pig Family is—

WESLEY: Can we read the Goldbug book, now?

VIRGINIA: [crying] I want to see Godbug! I want to see Godbug! Where’s Godbug?

In addition to the multitude of peripatetic, useless characters who crowd the margins of every page of Scarry’s books, he also includes a cast of regulars: Goldbug, Bananas Gorilla, Mistress Mouse, Lowly Worm, and Officer Flossy, among others. These singular worthies figure prominently in certain books, and they have a nagging tendency to turn up as supporting cast in other volumes, as well. The result, of course, is that when they appear with less than top billing in Scarry’s other elementary dramas, performing no less idiotically than the thousand or so other characters in his chorus-menagerie, they have the distracting habit of taking stage center away from whatever dog or cat has been officially assigned the leading role in the story at hand. This occasions much squirming by my tiny audience, and the demands for an immediate return to the star system in children’s literature are loud and long.

Another major problem with Scarry’s books is the plots—or the lack of them. The insipid activities of these mentally deficient characters are enough to addle any brain, but Scarry ensures adult doddering by supplementing such inanity as a pig mistaking a steam shovel for the family car or a rabbit becoming incurably (but painlessly) stuck in hot, sticky tar on a new roadway, by asking a series of rhetorical questions: “That wasn’t very smart of him, was it?” “She’ll have to be more careful next time, won’t she?” “Oh, he’s a naughty dog, isn’t he?” Only a parent/reader of Scarry’s books knows the incredible frustration of trying to answer to any degree of satisfaction such questions for a child/auditor:

—Why did he do that, Daddy?

—Because he’s naughty, I guess.

—Why’s he naughty?

—Because he just is, I guess.

—Will he get a spanking?

—No, but if he’s not careful, Richard Scarry may put him into another book.

The unplotted action winds on for pages and pages, and if the parent/reader is lucky enough to fool the child/auditor by avoiding explanations of the activities of about half the characters depicted on each page and can manage to turn rhetorical questions into absolute, declarative, unchallengeable sentences, then the book can be completed sometime before a toddler reaches puberty.

Each of Scarry’s books ends with some sort of surprise denouement that should be perfectly obvious from page one where the “hints” and leading questions—“Why do you suppose he did that?”—start. But they always manage to conclude just illogically enough to titillate youthful minds and make adult readers feel like brainless fools for not having seen it coming all along.

Some of Scarry’s books have no plots at all but fall under the category of “educational books,” that is, volumes that offer counting, letters, or colors for identification. My children particularly favor these items on Scarry’s literary menu, although I rarely manage to ask and explain my way through B or 2, perhaps, when the multitude of superfluous drawings and irrelevant activities causes a logjam of confusion that would defy Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox to untangle:

DADDY: How many airplanes do you see here?

WESLEY: One, Two, Three!

DADDY: No, count again.

WESLEY: One . . . Two . . . Three!

DADDY: No, son. Count once more.

VIRGINIA: [quickly] One-Two-Three. There are three, Daddy.

DADDY: It’s Wesley’s turn to count the page.

WESLEY: Yeah, Virginia, [with equal rapidity] One-two-three!

DADDY: No, there are two airplanes.

WESLEY: [accusingly] What’s this one, then?

VIRGINIA: [supportive] Yeah, what’s this one, then?

DADDY: Oh, I see. That’s a balloon.

WESLEY: That’s not a balloon.

DADDY: Yes, it is. That’s a hot-air balloon.

WESLEY: It’s got people in it.

DADDY: Well, yeah, but—

WESLEY: It goes up into the air, doesn’t it?

DADDY: Yeah, but it’s not an airplane.

VIRGINIA: Where’s the balloon. I don’t see a balloon.

DADDY: There’s the balloon, Virginia. It goes up in the air, and it carries people, but it’s not—

WESLEY: What makes it go up in the air?

DADDY: It’s a hot-air balloon. It goes up because it’s full of gas.

WESLEY: Gas?

DADDY: Yeah, like hot air.

WESLEY: Like in the car?

DADDY: No, that’s gasoline. Not gas. Gas is the . . . uh . . .

WESLEY: Hot air?

VIRGINIA: [blowing on Wesley] Like that?

WESLEY: Make her stop!

DADDY: No, not like that. Like hot air. Like . . . gas.

WESLEY: Like a poot?

VIRGINIA: [giggling] A poot!

DADDY: No. Well, yes. Sort of—

VIRGINIA: Wesley pooted!

WESLEY: Did not!

DADDY: Look, there are two airplanes on this page. Both have mice in them. See? This one’s a balloon. It looks kind of like an airplane, but it’s not. It’s crashed anyway.

VIRGINIA: One, two.

WESLEY: It’s my turn to count! Make her stop counting on my page!

DADDY: [turning the page] Okay, how many airplanes are on this page.

VIRGINIA: One-two-three-four!

DADDY: No, there are three. That’s a helicopter, Virginia.

WESLEY: Can we read the Goldbug book, next?

Usually at this point, Wesley refuses to count any more at all, and Virginia is so fascinated by what the worm, doggie, or kitty is doing with kites, flags and windsocks that she can’t concentrate beyond C or 3. Steadfastly, I am denied permission to skip pages or provide easy answers to speed things along; and as I anxiously watch the sun rising on our evening “Weadbook!” session, I wearily manage to get up to M or 9 before I attempt to distract my wide-awake audience with the offer of a midnight snack—or breakfast.

I have never consciously purchased but one Richard Scarry book. I don’t know of anyone who has deliberately bought more than two. But only one in the house is sufficient. Amoeba-like, they multiply right on the battered pressed wood bookshelves in a child’s room, drawing nourishment, no doubt, from the plethora of questions and abundance of curiosity they arouse in developing minds. Although I read to my children nightly and did so since Wesley was three months old, I don’t really remember reading a single Richard Scarry book more than twice in a given week. But somehow, I managed to be handed one I’ve never seen before each evening’s “Weadbook!” The tiny hands and pleading eyes that accompanied the presentation of the evening’s reading matter utterly defeated my resolve to avoid at any cost another trip down the lunacy-lined, twisting imbecility of Scarry Lane.

Thus, every night I found myself again ponderously trying to get the Pig Family from point A to point B while explaining why rabbits walk off piers, why only one out of nine boats is sinking, where the pickles on every page come from, why the kitty dropped the nails on the road to give the hippo’s car a flat tire, and how a tiny mouse can drive a giant dump truck that spilled the pickles that distracted the kitty that dropped the nails that caused the flat that confused the dog that upset the rhino who scared the worm and caused all of the problems that plague all of the characters that live in the books that Scarry built.

###

So I hate Richard Scarry’s books. But my children loved them. The blue-eyed wonder these books evoked was unrivaled by any other volumes in our library; and, I must grudgingly admit, the kids learned from them; and, I must grudgingly confess, so did I. Through his multifarious menagerie, Scarry demonstrates that all people, big and little, make mistakes and have accidents; he illustrates that everyone, no matter what station in life, faces pleasure and disaster and learns, somehow, to get through the day, even so; he dramatizes the ideal that the best attitude to take is not to blame or grieve in regret, but to learn from our actions and to improve our outlook, for tomorrow’s misadventures will probably be no less traumatic and challenging than today’s.

###

Most importantly, Scarry shows that there is humor and wisdom in human folly. Scarry’s genius, wit, and sense of the absurdist dimensions of life’s comedy are perfectly designed to charm and prick the imagination of the very young. They, after all, are the audience he seeks, not some grouchy adult with one eye on the clock and who would rather be sailing off with the owl and the pussycat or eating bread and honey in the court of Old King Cole than wandering aimlessly around with the Pig Family, crawling along with Lowly Worm, and finding the ever-elusive Goldbug.

And if I had to answer a few hundred—or thousand—questions along the way, what of it? That’s what being a parent is mostly about, and what did I have to do that was truly more important? Besides, who’s a better arbiter of the quality of what Scarry does than the children themselves? The very fact that Scarry’s mindless, comic fictions excite questions, curiosity, and attention gives them the indelible stamp of worth as children’s literature of the first order. In the meantime, the House at Pooh Corner, Mount Olympus, and Shakespeare’s magical tales were still around when the children were ready for them; somehow, I think that the sweetness and delight of Richard Scarry’s fertile imagination better prepare kids to appreciate them.

TEA TIME ON THE GREEN: OR DOUBLE-BOGEY AT 8:00

“A game whereby one attempts to put a very small ball

into an even smaller hole with tools

singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”

—Winston Churchill

A couple of years ago, I took up golf, more or less seriously. Well, at least more or less regularly. As a youngster in West Texas, I had played on the hardscrabble courses of our county country club (I won’t ponder the absurdity of a mostly rural county having a “country club”), but I’d found the game to be more hot and bothersome than anything like fun. Fairways consisted mostly of pounded farmland covered by a bad comb-over of weeds punctuated by rocks; greens more closely resembled worn patches of shag carpeting, haphazardly trimmed; roughs in that rustic geography consisted of mesquite thickets where rattlesnakes and devil’s claw flourished; and we thought “water hazard” meant a hose the greensman forgot to roll up. There were no sand traps; they would have been redundant, as the entire county sat on top of a gritty bed of hard-packed, drought-toughened red sand. The highlight of the whole outing in those days, actually, was a chance to hang around the pool and ogle the girls afterward.

In truth, I’ve never been much of an athlete. I played some beer-league softball in college, but only for the beer and to ogle the girls in the stands. I’d bowled for a while until one of my league teammates dropped a ball on my toe and terminated my enthusiasm as well as my toenail. There was a decade or so when I dedicated myself to tennis, and I actually was decent at it; but then my knees turned into a half-pound of cracked cookies, thereby thwarting any ambitions I might have developed toward doing anything in the way of sports that required more effort than it took to watch a few innings of baseball on television. Football was never in my league, and I was too short, fat, and white for basketball to hold any temptation whatsoever. I sort of liked pool-shooting—or what is mistakenly called “billiards” in today’s parlance—but mostly in bars where I could drink beer and ogle the girls. For the most part, my idea of athletics was centered on lethargy, with a healthy dose of indolence to sustain it.

But a few years ago, I was summoned to meet some film folks in Tucson, Arizona. The idea was that they might make a movie out of one of my novels. I wasn’t truly hopeful, but they were paying for the trip, so I figured I might as well go along. After all, I played the Lotto, and the odds against success in Hollywood were about the same. The woman who picked me up at the airport to ferry me to my hotel casually noted that our “tea-time” had been moved up to eight a.m. the following morning.

I wanted to be accommodating and show I had a sense of humor, so I replied, “That’s okay. I prefer coffee.”

She gave me a curious look. “No, I mean tee-time. Our tee-off time is now at eight o’clock.”

“Golf?” I asked, now understanding and totally horrified. “You expect me to play golf!”

Indeed she did. I was added to a foursome that included three apparently dedicated duffers. They arrived well-equipped with expensive graphite clubs and matching bags and were all decked out in their athletic sartorial best for a full round on one of the nicer desert courses of the Southwest.

To say the least, this was disheartening. I was standing there beside a bag of mismatched, rented clubs, wearing cut-off jeans, a faded Texas Rangers tee-shirt I’d brought to sleep in, and a pair of dilapidated sneakers patched with duct tape. I made a sorry complement to the group. I didn’t even know my handicap, except insofar as my fundamental ability went. They immediately demonstrated, though, that fashion didn’t necessarily ensure ability. Far from shooting a fantastic round to match their duds, none of the three broke 100. I would have felt better about the whole outing, but I didn’t break 120, myself, even with extra mulligans, generous gimmes, and liberal applications of the “foot wedge” when no one was looking.

But in spite of the embarrassment, which they were kind enough to laugh off, I made an odd discovery. I enjoyed myself. I had a blast, in fact. I totally forgot that it was unlikely that they would make my work into a film—and they didn’t. Still, over drinks in the “Nineteenth Hole,” we took time out from ogling the girls and watched the television screen in amazement as a (then) relatively unknown young pro named Tiger Woods made a hole in one. I was hooked. I couldn’t wait to get home, drag out my old set of sticks and get out to the links.

###

Now, over the years, I’d had brief spates of insanity when I decided to take up golf and find out what all the excitement was about. My father-in-law is a pretty good golfer. I think, in fact, that at one point in his life, he shot scratch golf and was a better-than-average amateur. Sometime after my wife and I married, in a misguided inspiration to find something that he and I could do together, I bought a set of clubs from a garage sale. It consisted of some heavy Wilson irons and (real wood) woods, and I had dutifully taken them out and tried to use them to build closer bridges to the family. It hadn’t worked. Even when I applied myself, I was unable to shoot anything like a decent score. It was also somewhat humiliating to be thoroughly whipped by a man twenty-nine years older than I, especially when he only carried a 5-iron, a pitching wedge, and a putter onto the course and explained that it was one of the easier tracks in the area. He usually played it “just to limber up.”

Part of the trouble was where I was living and trying to relearn how to play at the time. I was in Beaumont, down in deep East Texas, a region of the country where (no kidding) stainless steel is commonly known to rust. Courses down there don’t have “rough”; they have swamp. Southeast Texas swamps are treacherous, as they often appear to be dry and solid until you put a foot into them. Then you sink to your knees in slimy muck and watch helplessly while poisonous amphibians swirl around your legs and people around you start yelling for someone to go fetch a boat and some rope. On some area courses, alligators are occasional hazards; more than one potential birdie putt has been left lying next to a scaly reptile that decided that a par-three green looked like a comfy place for a nap in the sun.

Southeast Texas golf courses are aswarm with thus far unclassified but menacing fauna. On one occasion, I actually struck a ball that landed in the middle of the fairway, when some fairly large, furry, sharp-fanged creature scurried out of the forest, gave me a snarl, grabbed my ball in its teeth, then raced off into the dense greenery. I didn’t pursue. I also didn’t take a penalty stroke. Similar hazards can be encountered on courses nearer the brinier bayous, where eel, gar, and other vicious water monsters lurk to attack unsuspecting ball-hawkers. Other problems, not the least of which are mosquitoes the size of attack helicopters and the occasional backwoods poacher mistaking a duffer for a deer, are found on many back nines in southeast Texas. Golf was not designed for such environments.

My enthusiasm came and went in waves, even so. At one point, during a tour of Scotland, I determined to immerse myself in the history of the game by playing a round on the “Auld Course” at St. Andrews. I rented clubs and shoes, bought balls and even donned a stout rubberized raincoat. You see, the course at St. Andrews, where, traditionally, the whole absurdity began, is not exactly what one might expect, even in early July, the time of my visit. The Scots’ idea of a water hazard is the North Sea.

That July morning, the wind off the water was coming in at a comparatively light thirty-five miles an hour. The temperatures were in the low forties, and waves crashing on the Scottish coast combined with a thick mist blowing in off the ocean to insure that any striker was thoroughly soaked before he got off the first tee. St. Andrews is a nine-hole course, which one plays twice from different tips. After a mere five holes, my glasses were frosted over, and I was shivering too hard to see the ball, let alone hit it. I also discovered that sand traps there were more like bomb shelters, and there was something about a thoroughly soused green that impeded a true roll toward the cup. Somewhere on the sixth fairway, I drove a seven-iron shot directly toward the flag, but after about forty yards up into the wind, it took a U-turn and landed behind me in the wet middle of what would have been a lake on the West Texas courses of my youth; in Scotland it didn’t qualify as occasional water.

On the seventh hole, I finally surrendered to the elements and trudged off the course; I was greeted by a local hacker, replete with plus-fours, argyle socks, pom-pom-topped tam, and nothing heavier than a sleeveless sweater against the deluge. He smilingly assured me, “This is as bonny a day for a rund of gorf as I’ve seen in a month of Sundays.” I determined that I was not cut out for Scottish golf any more than I was for the swamp golf of southeast Texas. At least the whiskey in the club house was warming, even if there were no lasses to ogle.

Later on, I moved to North Texas, where golf is affectionately referred to as “pasture pool.” Most municipal courses are constructed on land that only a few short decades ago was home to cotton, corn, or beef cattle; or possibly, it was a city dump during some earlier era. The few water hazards are almost completely man-made. Out-of-bounds markers are sometimes constructed of electrified barbed wire, and it’s not uncommon to hit a ball into a neighboring farmer’s stand of alfalfa. Sand for the bunkers has to be imported, and it’s usually packed tighter than concrete—if sprinklers haven’t turned them to mud—and trees are, well, little more than thorny bushes rising from large patches of poison ivy. Playing golf there, particularly in the heat of summer, is more a matter of endurance than sport. With temperatures reaching better than 100 degrees on an average July afternoon, heat exhaustion is a fair possibility, even if one is riding in a cart.

Of course, Texas does boast some of the best maintained and most beautiful golf courses in the world. But this is not where daily duffers like myself play. Rather than being partnered with designer-clothing-attired strikers with state-of-the-art equipment that matches right down to their ball-markers, one is more likely to be paired off with a snuff-dipping good ol’ boy in a straw hat, bib overalls and work boots who only carries five clubs with mismatched grips in a homemade bag capacious enough to accommodate the better part of a six-pack. The odd thing is that he might shoot in the low seventies, even after he’s totally sloshed.

So, after all these miserable experiences, I gave up any notions of playing the game and began deriding it with a special form of contempt. It was a silly game, I explained to my links-enthused friends. “You hit the ball, then you chase it and hit it again, and the object is to knock the ball into a hole and lose it.” I added with conviction, “Golf is sort of like daydreaming without a satisfying fantasy.” Hence, I abandoned any notions of playing golf, except perhaps the miniature version I had to endure as part of children’s birthday parties. Then came Tucson.

###

My Arizona experience changed everything. I ignored the possible fact that the course I played was private, well-manicured, shadowed by gorgeous mountains, and actually had plush grass and fluffy sand in the bunkers, that the greens were carefully tended and even the fairway sod was soft enough to invite a divot. I imagined that the conditions would ultimately rise to match improvement, and I was determined to try to master the game on some level. For several years, I took lessons, practiced, and played at least once a week, with no noticeable improvement in my score, but with no diminishing of my enthusiasm. One definition of insanity, we are reminded, is to do the same thing over and over again, but to expect a different result each time. Golf, of course, is merely another version of that. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of self-imposed mental cruelty and confirmation of personal frustration and inferiority in our society. No matter how optimistically a round starts out, at some point before the eighteen are completed, most golfers are counting the remaining holes and thinking, “Just X more greens before this misery is ended.” Why anyone claims to enjoy golf is a complete mystery to me. I can think of few endeavors in life, except maybe sex, where failure evokes such feelings of inadequacy and insecurity laced with frustration and self-loathing. Even a casual observer driving by a public course can witness otherwise rational and well-adjusted men slamming their clubs into the ground or some available tree, cursing the clouds in the sky, flinging balls or even entire bags of equipment into nearby ponds, and railing like lunatics and foaming at the mouth over a missed putt or duffed chip. Of course, dedicated players will tell you that all this is relaxing. They’ll say that it’s all about getting away from the job, out into the fresh air, and, of course, exercising, that mantra of today’s health-conscious middle-aged population.

But that’s a lie. Few foursomes, even on the most rustic of municipal courses, play a round without a minimum of two well-charged cell phones tucked away in their bags; and now, I read, newer model golf carts are coming equipped with power points to facilitate the use of laptops. The fresh air is genuine, of course, provided the course isn’t next to some traffic-choked freeway or buried in the middle of urban industrialization—which most are—but the notion that golf provides exercise is ridiculous. Even Mark Twain knew that. He called it “a three-mile walk, spoiled.”

Naturally, golf should be a “walking game.” A typical eighteen-hole round should take a player on a three-to-four-mile vigorous hike, depending on how straight he hits the ball. When the prospect of toting a twenty-five-to-thirty-pound bag is added, along with eighty-to-ninety (or maybe a hundred or more) swings of the club, it should be an exhausting but rejuvenating experience. And it would be, if golfers walked. But they don’t. They mostly ride around in electric carts. What with beverage service and drive-through windows at the club houses, there’s no reason to get out at the turn unless nature calls. Some golfers would never leave their carts on the entire round if the course would permit them to drive up onto the greens. In a way, a contemporary round is more like a game of motorized polo, with the players only having to leave their seats and walk no more than two or three steps to the ball when they hit an especially bad shot out of bounds, as if it’s some sort of punishment.

Indeed, many courses require that players use carts, especially on weekends when the links are crowded and the speed of play is a factor. But most golfers also know that they can carry more beer in a cart than they can in a bag; thus far, there are no legal restrictions on blood-alcohol levels for drivers of golf carts.

So if the canned reasons aren’t genuine enough to provide motivation to drive otherwise rational and reasonable people out to the course for a round of eighteen, what is the real appeal? There is, after all, a huge downside to the whole experience.

For one thing, golf is expensive. Apart from the initial purchase of equipment—clubs, bag, caps, shoes, etc., which can run from a few hundred upwards to a couple of thousand dollars, and all of which are outmoded on an annual basis—there’s the question of balls. The average weekend duffer will lose about six balls a round, most of them into water hazards or deep woods or off on the opposite side of busy highways running parallel to a tee-box. On some residential courses, backyards are the unintentional target for many a slice. Some course-side homeowners have posted “No Trespassing” signs or have acquired large, mean canines to prevent ball-shagging. Thus, they can shave quite a lot from their mortgage payments by selling errant balls they collect back to the local pro shops. One backyard I saw faced a particularly nasty dogleg. There were five ten-gallon buckets full of collected balls sitting by his back door. New golf balls run from about a buck apiece for used or “X-Out” or overrun logo editions all the way up to forty or fifty dollars a dozen for the fancier, high-tech products. If a golfer’s game is as bad as mine, and if he buys even the medium-deluxe models, he’s looking at spending nearly as much for lost balls as he does for green fees.

And green fees are high. Most municipal courses charge anywhere from about fifteen up to fifty dollars a round for weekday play and add about twenty or thirty percent more for a weekend eighteen. Open club courses can get as much as a hundred-fifty a round, and country clubs demand membership and gouge guests heavily as well, especially for concessions, equipment, and necessary accoutrements such as divot-repair tools and cleverly designed liquor flasks. Some private clubs get more for a round of golf than it would cost to buy a pretty nice big-screen television. And all this cost is assessed merely to give the individual player the chance to thoroughly disgrace himself in front of people he knows well and would probably like to impress.

Then there’s the apparel. Specially designed shirts, sweaters, hats, visors, slacks, shorts, shoes, even socks are more or less required for golf. Some courses have strict dress codes, prohibiting “logo display” or blue jeans to be worn by anyone but the groundsmen. Occasionally, even those poor guys have to wear uniforms. Virtually anyone who is serious about the game doesn’t want to be singled out as a weekend hacker by appearing in less than the height of fashion on the Number One Tee. Overalls and work boots are not apt to be seen on many courses outside Texas, I wouldn’t imagine.

Next to fishing, no other sporting activity offers a wider array or greater variety of expensive and virtually useless accessories: gloves, tees, club brushes, spike tools, extra spikes, ball fetchers, and even a specially designed “golf umbrella” fill out the average golfer’s kit. Then, there are travel bags, head covers, towels, range finders, binoculars, electronic scorecards, club cleaners, ball washers, and cigar caddies, a small pegged platform on which a player can rest his burning smoke while hooking a ball into the left rough. And, of course, there are limitless libraries of instructional manuals, books, magazines and pamphlets, training clubs, mechanized swing straighteners, special braces, wraps, and bandages, all designed to improve a player’s game and shave strokes off his handicap, although none does. And, in case the experience itself fails to indelibly etch painful sorrow on the soul of the player, one can buy a whole gallery of paintings, prints, photographs, clever signs and desk decorations ranging from paperclip dispensers and mouse pads to lamps and rugs, and even a desk designed in the shape of the “Amen Corner” at some famous course; price tag: $8,999.99, plus shipping (assembly required).

But expenses aside and frustrations aside, golf is a maddening game. Unlike other sports such as baseball, tennis, or basketball, a few guys can’t just get together and smack the ball around to practice technique and improve form. To practice golf, one has to go to a driving range several times a week and pay (again) for the privilege of mishitting the ball for an hour or so. At most ranges, it’s possible to lay out huge amounts of money for lessons from a “pro,” a guy who never quite made it in the PGA, who will stand around for a few minutes, maybe even shoot some video tape, before making a few elementary suggestions about changing or adjusting a dozen or so things having to do with set-up, finish, stance, grip, swing, balance, head position, knee position, back position, grip-fingering, eye contact, how close one is to the ball, how far away one is from the ball, where the ball is in the stance, take-away, club-facing, aiming, targeting, and the way one holds one’s mouth during set-up, backswing, and follow-through, then leaving the “student” to practice all these things while he adjourns to the air conditioning of the clubhouse bar to have a couple of beers, ogle the girls, and laugh at the silly idiot whose slice is so bad he risks serious head injury every time he swings the club.

Still, every day, in every part of the country, people like me go out onto a course to try to convince themselves that it’s possible to hit that little white ball with that costly high-tech club and make it go where they want it to. But it almost never does. And if it does, there is always the nagging suspicion that they’ve made some kind of mistake, if only they could remember what it was so they could repeat it. They almost never can.

###

On the amateur level, golf isn’t really a game because it’s noncompetitive. The rules are what they are, but there aren’t many of them, and it’s up to each player which rules he will violate and how often. Cheating, therefore, is okay, because the only one cheated is the cheater. No matter how dishonest one is and how often one gets away with it, the player knows when he’s taken an extra stroke, shaved his score, or moved the ball to a better lie. Self-recrimination is probably found nowhere else—except perhaps in extramarital love affairs—as often as it is in golf.

Of course, some people gamble on golf. They not only bet on who will have the lowest score, but also on individual holes; they’ll bet on the length of a drive, number of putts, number of pars, number of bogeys, who gets closest to the pin, and whether or not the beverage cart girl will be a blonde or a brunette. (Redheads are a “push” and everyone re-antes.) The betting isn’t about the money, though, no matter how much is at stake. It’s a weak attempt to stop cheating, but it doesn’t work; instead, it makes it worse. It’s bad enough to realize you had to cheat to maintain some shred of self-respect. When a fifty-dollar wager rides on avoiding another double-bogey, almost any golfer will wait till his partner’s back is turned, then improve his lie.

Thus, the game is costly to play, has no innate athleticism, promises little satisfaction, offers no honest competitive element, and is almost impossible to master. All players, even pros, are “working on” their game every time they tee-off, and not even the most seasoned veteran ever owns the confidence and finds the personal fulfillment that can come from even the most mundane chores, such as mowing the lawn. Even so, reports from all major media indicate that golf not only is sustaining its popularity in the United States, but that it may well be the fastest growing sport in the country. New courses are being constructed and opened at a record-breaking pace. And there are reasons for this, for golf does have redeeming qualities, as an activity if not as a game or a bona fide sport. Herein its magic may truly lie.

Now, I cannot speak for the appeal golf may have for women, although I’m sure it’s no less powerful an allure than it is for men, if not for many of the same, then for different but equal reasons. But over years since I’ve been trying to play regularly, I’ve come to a conclusion that the principal allure of golf to men is that . . . well, it allows them to be men, or, more accurately, to be male.

Don’t get me wrong. Golf is far from a masculine activity. I recall a few years ago, some club or ball or clothing company put out a television commercial that depicted four or five professional golfers of some celebrity walking in slow motion up onto a tee-box. Each carried an oversized driver in one hand and a ball and tee in the other. In the background was heavy, pounding, minor-key, testosterone-suggestive music. It was ludicrous. The first time I saw it was on a television in the “Nineteenth Hole” of a municipal golf club. Somebody yelled, “Hey, you guys. Lookit this!” and the entire place stopped ogling the girls and erupted in derisive laughter. It was funny, but I don’t think it was meant to be.

The point is that it’s just impossible to equate even the most masculine of professional golfers with other pro athletes. They’re athletic, of course, and, on the whole, I think they’re in great shape and work as hard as any professional sports competitor. They also play for pretty good money. But there’s just something about “playing” in tailored slacks, saddle oxfords, and a cashmere sweater that doesn’t evoke images of blood, sweat, and raw manliness of genuine sport. As a rule, golfers just don’t need a ten-gallon tub of Gatorade strapped to their carts. A cold six-pack will do nicely.

But there is a machismo about golf, and has nothing to do with the game itself. Primarily, playing a round of golf gives men the chance, as I say, to be male. That is, it gives them a chance to smoke, gamble, swear, scratch, pass gas, throw temper tantrums, be obscene, piss in the bushes, tell dirty sexist jokes, and, not incidentally, drink beer and ogle the girls. In other words, it gives them a chance generally to be their natural selves without fear of being closely observed, overheard, or censured—especially by women. Once they are safely out of the house and onto the fairway, they needn’t worry about some sensitive feminine consciousness responding to what they say or do, and they can look forward to nearly four hours of absolute freedom from political correctness, politeness, tact, and diplomacy. Ironically, they find freedom of self-expression in a game that is, perhaps, governed by one of the strictest codes of etiquette known in modern sports.

Of course, most of these same advantages can be found in the average tavern, pool hall, or honkey-tonk—and in some bowling alleys, doubtless. But on the golf course there is at least the suggestion of wholesome surroundings and positive activity as well as the ambiance of middle-class prestige; and it’s unlikely that any man’s significant female other can find much to object to in her guy’s whiling away a summer afternoon surrounded by the pastoral beauty of a golf course, even if it was formerly a cow pasture, landfill, or unclaimed swamp, and even if there are girls to ogle.

Moreover, unlike fishing or hunting or any other traditionally “male-bonding activity,” there’s little danger of drowning or an accidental shooting or of the poor slob getting lucky and bringing home some ugly, bloody, semi-edible dead animal or slimy, nearly spoiled fish for his wife to try to convert into a meal, so he can brag to his buddies. Recalling near birdies and almost eagles seem a good deal more inviting as cocktail party fare than another rehash of “the big one that got away,” or “the twelve-point buck” that was just out of range. And however expensive golf may be to play, it’s still cheaper than a bass boat or a collection of rods and reels, shotguns and rifles, deer leases and duck blinds, and all the other do-dads, gimcracks, and geegaws required by those other sports.

There’s also little risk in golf of sprained ankles, torn ligaments, thrown backs, concussions, or other debilitating injuries commonly associated with team sports. Unless one trips over the cart path on the way to the beverage cart, a golf injury is highly unlikely.

Finally, of course, there is the issue of proximity. Golf courses are conveniently nearby anyone’s home, and a daily round still leaves time for household chores and a family dinner. There’s no packing of trucks, trailers, and RVs; no tune-up of outboards or charging of batteries; no propane, flashlights, suitcases, duffle bags, or tackle boxes. Just a bag of clubs, a case of balls, and, of course, a six-pack of beer. Plus, nobody’s worn out after a round of golf. In fact, unless it’s extremely warm, few golfers ever break a sweat until they start ogling the girls.

There are, doubtlessly, similar appeals found by female players, but I would not hazard even a hint of a guess as to what it might be, except to say, that most women probably relish the notion of being out in the fresh air, away from the job, home, kids, and getting some exercise without the bothersome company of men. The difference, of course, is that even though many of them use carts, women usually mean these things when they say them.

Mixed-gender golf groups retard and inhibit these appeals, of course, as do days when players stack up on top of one another, crowding the distances between foursomes and demanding at least a semblance of decorum if not decency. But generally, my observation has been that twosomes, threesomes, and foursomes tend to be gender-specific. Men play with men. Women play with women. In case there is any doubt that the golf gods don’t want to keep it that way, note the significant distances between men’s and women’s tees. That’s not because women are physically smaller and need the advantage; I think it’s because it’s annoying to play with people who tee off from different locations, so it discourages mixed groups.

Thus the recent surge of interest in golf may truly be more of a response to some deeper phenomenon in the American psyche than any desire to be a sportsman or gamester. Most golfers will confess that they don’t play very well. More will confess that they truly “hate the game” and they only vaguely understand why they come out and spend all kinds of money on it.

But they also know that buried beneath the practical reasons for doing something else—like trimming the hedge, rotating the tires, cleaning out the garage, or taking the kids to Chucky Cheese—there is the irresistible call of the masculine wild, the attraction of being in the society of individuals who understand one another and are sympathetic to the need for honest expression and uninhibited juvenile behavior, the unmatched and primeval fundamental good feeling and incredible adrenaline rush that comes from hitting a truly good shot and being able to say, “Man! I knocked the piss outta that one!” and not having to look around and see who might be listening.

So I suspect that golf will be around for a while longer and will continue to grow in popularity. I was told recently that over 11,000,000 Americans go out to the links at least twice a month to lose balls and humiliate themselves. The average handicap among amateurs is somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, and the average expenditure on the game runs close to fifteen hundred dollars a year. That may be a small price to pay for a few hours of freedom from reality and an opportunity to renew one’s conviction that there are just some things in life that can never be mastered but offer other incentives that are alluring and always tempting to sample. And besides, there’s always the possibility that a new oversized platinum-coated, feather-weight driver with the skid-proof grip, latex-coated super-flex shaft, and gyro-balanced, stainless steel-faced head will finally provide an extra twenty yards right down the middle. And if it doesn’t, well there’s cold beer in the clubhouse and always some girls to ogle.

THE PROFITS OF PROSE

“Fiction is a lie, with which we tell the truth.”

—Robert Flynn

I’m a writer. In something more than a manner of speaking, I suppose I’ve always been a writer. I didn’t realize that for a long time. Indeed, what angers me most when I consider the point is that I was nearly four decades into my life before I could accept the fact of what I was. I seem to have wasted a lot of time. I spent almost half my life working toward being a scholar. My scholarship is still important to me, but it took a while for me to realize that what thrilled me about publishing research and criticism was less the content of what I had to say than the thrill of having people read my words and comment on the way I said it. Then I managed to publish some fiction; and although my success, such as it has been, is modest by any standard, I found myself at middle age and beginning a second career without having satisfactorily completed the first one.

I feel the pressure of time on me always. My biggest worry is whether I can tell all the stories I want to tell in the time I have left.

Of course, none of us really knows how much time he has left. Preston Jones was a writer, and a very good one in my opinion, but he didn’t find out that he was a writer until he was only a couple of beers shy of the ulcer that killed him. It’s fun to speculate on what he might have done had he relocated from a beer joint to a fern bar and switched from Bud to Perrier. I suspect, though, that he wouldn’t have been a writer anymore. Writers are notoriously self-destructive, and it’s their habit to find their inspiration in the very elements that threaten them. I think it’s part of their mystique.

Some writers discover or at least decide that they are writers early in life. In fact, their careers actually start before they have written or published anything. The world is full of writers who have never published. When I was in graduate school, I met a man named Ben. He handed me his business card. It had his name, and beneath the name, it said “Writer.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed that I had never heard of him (English graduate students are supposed to know about writers.) “What have you written?”

“Nothing yet,” he smiled at me. “I’m working on a couple of novels, though.”

A couple of novels. It’s like someone saying, “I’m not six-foot-five yet, but I’m working on a couple of inches.” I decided right then that I would never call myself a writer until I had written—and published—something. I recognize that publication doesn’t necessarily make a person a writer, but it’s the only real validation I can understand. Without it, I am merely playing at writing, practicing well and hard, perhaps, but not yet in the game.

Then there are the writers who have instant—and young—success. That is, they have published their work. I don’t like these writers very much. They tend to be cocky, overconfident, arrogant. They often write a lot about other writers, usually men, who are middle-aged and frightened of growing older. What do they know? They haven’t faced impotence or a shortness of breath from a moderately high staircase. They don’t have to watch what they eat or worry about the distance from their office to the john. They haven’t looked into the mirror one morning and discovered that their hair is thinning as rapidly as their hips are making rain-gutters for their waists. They haven’t found the value of comfortable shoes or that sleep is more fun than watching late-night TV. They are ignorant of ordered priorities that put nightclubs and skiing vacations beneath a trip to the dentist or socking money away for retirement. They haven’t come to terms with the notion that no matter how successful they are, they will never own a Porsche convertible, because such a car is impractical and silly for people their age.

Why don’t they write about what they know? Why don’t they write about buying their first legal drink? Their first sexual encounter? Their first vote? I know one young writer I met right after his book came out. He was wearing a jeans jacket and dusty boots. He wrote a book about an artist—not a writer—who was middle-aged and frightened of growing older. I tried to like him even so, and I bought his book, had him sign it. We had a couple of beers together. He drank his slowly, and I determined that he didn’t much like beer. He was very young, I thought. He worked out and had clear skin and a full head of curly hair. His teeth were white and he didn’t smoke, and he switched from beer to white wine on the second round. He drove a Porsche convertible. He lived with a twenty-two-year-old symphony orchestra cellist, who had legs that went from her well-shaped calves all the way up to her long, thin neck. Her mouth was gorgeous, and she had long, graceful fingers. She was without a doubt the sexiest woman I’d ever seen. And she was in awe of him and of his role as a writer. She announced that they had no intention of marrying, because she and he each had their own lives to live. She looked at him with a doe’s eyes, though. “He’s a wonderful writer,” she assured me. When she looked at me, I felt like a “funny uncle.”

I was envious of anyone whose career blossomed so quickly, who could use his talent to acquire a fine sports car and a beautiful, talented companion. Then I read his book. I didn’t think it was very good. In fact, I wondered how it was ever published. Publication is hard, and this book was hard to read, for it was trite and badly written. He wrote things like “extend out” and “center around” and used “impact” as a verb when he wasn’t talking about infected wisdom teeth. He had characters with names like “Lance” and “Marsha,” and everyone drove Porches and BMWs and had .38 revolvers handy and spent summers in the South of France and went to the opera and ate escargot and knew the differences between airliners. There was a lot of talk about stocks and bonds, and the main character was a Republican. There was a lot of sex, but none of it was normal, and everyone did drugs. I read several reviews of the book, and no one seemed to like it. I spoke to a number of people whose opinions I respected. They hated it. He made close to a quarter of a million dollars in residual sales, though, and he got a movie contract for nearly a hundred thousand more. I understand he traded his Porsche for a Ferrari.

I saw the young writer a few months later in New York. He was no longer wearing a jeans jacket and dusty boots. He had on a rag-wool turtleneck and ostrich-skin boots all under a Brooks Brothers trench coat that was worn fashionably open with a silk scarf hanging loose around his shoulders. His hair was carefully mussed, and I noticed that he was trying with no success whatsoever to grow a beard. The cellist was with him. She still adored him. She looked at me as if I were a leper.

“How’s it going?” I asked him.

“How do I get to Rockerfeller Center?” he replied. I was confused. Then I realized he was looking right through me. He was talking to the doorman. He didn’t hear me, although we weren’t but five feet apart. I heard later through a mutual friend that he was unhappy with me because he heard, correctly, that I refused to review his book. He said he thought I was jealous of him, of his success. He was right. Had I reviewed it, though, I wouldn’t have let my jealousy color my opinion. It might have improved it, in fact.

###

Not all writers are young, and not all writers are published, and not all writers are successful. I know of several writers who have been working on manuscripts since before they were young and who will never be published; if they ever are, they will likely fail. I don’t always know what keeps them going. They’re good writers. They’ve studied the art and craft of writing, and they work hard at it. They attend all the workshops and read all the “how to” manuals. As they grow older and collect a compost pile of rejection slips, they refuse to be discouraged. They aren’t quixotic. They aren’t foolish dreamers. They want to write, and publication is only one part of their ambition. This isn’t to say they don’t want to be published. It’s only to say that their priorities are on writing. It’s what they do, and it’s the only thing they want to do. In a way, any measure of success might spoil them.

I empathize with them terribly. It’s awful to do anything without recognition. It’s particularly awful to write something no one will ever read. But then again, if a writer starts believing that people may actually read everything he writes, he might not write at all, or at least he might not write honestly.

I know other writers who will never be writers. They call me up and write letters to me. They say, “I’ve got a story here that just won’t quit. It’s about my grandfather. He was a pig farmer who came to Texas in a Model-T Ford. His wife had a wooden leg and raised twenty-two children, all of whom became doctors and went to South America to cure dysentery. Two of them returned and became governors, and one bought an island in the Pacific and invaded Australia. It’s got everything. It’ll practically write itself.”

“How much have you written on it?” I ask.

“Oh, I’ve roughed it out,” they say, “but most of it’s on tape.” Then they offer to let me “finish” it for them. They tell me it’s a best seller. They are sure of it. They are probably pleased to think so, but it never will be a best seller. That’s because it will never be a book. It’s their story, but they can’t tell it. I can’t tell it either. I have my own stories to tell, my own failure to worry about. They don’t really want to be writers. They want to be authors. They have an idea that all they have to do is speak into a microphone and then let someone write it up. That’s all there is to it, after all, that and fixing their grammar and cashing the royalty checks.

Very few people know what it takes to be a writer, even fewer know what it takes to be an author. I didn’t know. I don’t know yet, but I’m trying hard to find out. I do know that only a very few writers are in danger of becoming authors, and even fewer are in danger of making a living from their writing. Most writers write because they have to, not because they have some idea about fame and fortune. It’s nice to be read—that’s all the fame I ever wanted, or so I lied to myself. It would be nice to be rich, but I’d settle for paying my American Express bill. And that’s not a lie.

###

Many people have the idea that writing a novel is a lot like building a boat in the basement or growing tomatoes in a window box. These people anger me. They make small of what I do, of what all writers do. Unlike unpublished writers, these people are smarmy about it. Once a physician came up to me and said, as all these types of people eventually do, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel. One of these days, when I have time, I’m going to do it.”

I was not in a good mood at the time, and I replied, “Well, you know, I’ve always wanted to take out an appendix. One of these days, when I have time, I’m going to do it.”

I had no such illusions about being a writer. I was from a small town in Texas, and writers lived in New York. They still do. But I had this yen to tell stories, so I wrote science fiction tales in high school. This was because of Mrs. McSpadden, my typing teacher during my junior year at Quanah High School. I was a crackerjack typist. It’s one of the few things involving manual dexterity I can do well. I’m fast and I’m accurate, for the most part. (I probably would have made a heck of a concert pianist if I had had the patience to study music. On the other hand, I play a lousy guitar.) In Mrs. McSpadden’s class, I could complete and check a half-hour’s exercise in about ten minutes. That left forty unfilled minutes. In any other class I would have read a book, but she insisted that we practice after we finished. I didn’t want to practice, so I wrote science fiction stories. They were pretty awful, but they were fun because I could make up anything I didn’t know. I invented “warp drive” years before Captain Kirk split his famous infinitive. But I wasn’t a writer.

When science fiction ran out, I wrote poetry. My poetry was pretty awful, too, but it gave me practice resetting margin stops and tabs. I did submit a poem for the yearbook my senior year, and it was published; but it was the only one submitted, so I had something of a lock on it. Still, it was the first time I ever thought about being a writer. But thinking about it didn’t make me a writer either.

I was never very good in English in high school or college. My senior English teacher in high school made me write “I will not be a wise ass in class” five thousand times because I kept putting jokes in my essays. They were funny jokes, she told me, but she couldn’t allow it. She was my first cousin, and I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. She made me write all those sentences, and she checked to make sure I didn’t use carbons. It took me three weeks. I thought it would earn her forgiveness, and I put a joke or two in my next essay. She punished me by giving the Senior English award to someone else. “You’ll never be a writer,” she said.

In college, English mystified me. It didn’t seem to have much to do with literature. Instead, it had to do with books that had to do with literature, and it was boring. The professors made reading assignments, then they went through the works and told us what we had read, and then they talked about the criticism. I began to understand that writers weren’t very important. It was what was said about them that was important.

That’s still true, and no one knows it better than a writer. It isn’t whether people like a book or not that counts. It’s whether the reviewers and critics like it or not. People who would never say an unkind thing to Osama bin Laden will walk up to a writer whose book has just been published and say, “I saw a review of your novel. They didn’t like it much.”

That’s like saying to a parent, “I just heard some people talking about your son. They think he’s the ugliest thing ever to crawl out from under a rock.”

The grim reality is that the critics have all the power. They can decide with the stroke of a byte on a disk whether a book lives or dies. They will determine who will receive the next Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize. People think it’s the readers who determine a writer’s success, and in some cases that’s true, but not in many. Most people don’t read very many books. The average “voracious reader,” if I can use the phrase, probably reads fewer than a dozen books a year, and only about a third of those are new ones, books that depend on sales—and reviews—to stay in print. The average American doesn’t read any books at all. Even well-educated people don’t read many books. They read reviews. They read the critics. It’s pretty easy to see how powerful critics are. So, I abandoned any idle thoughts about being a writer. I became a critic.

I spent about fifteen years becoming a critic, and I wrote a lot of criticism. I still do. I was a mean critic. I made fun of writers who made mistakes. I said things like, “This book isn’t worth using as a door stop or a boat anchor.” I liked that. It had a “folksy ring” to it.

Then I became a writer myself, and my attitude changed.

###

I didn’t think I would become a writer, and I didn’t call myself a writer until I did. I remembered my friend Ben, and I thought of my “real writer” friends who continued to slave away without success. I had not studied to become a writer. I hadn’t suffered. I hadn’t been rejected. When writers would gather at parties, I would stand off to one side and wonder at them. They would look at me with eyes that said, “He’s a critic. Be careful.” Although, none of them had read my criticism.

But I had children, a wife who worked at night, and I was bored. I couldn’t go to the library to do the research a critic must do, and I found that reading, like hot meals and long showers and naps, isn’t possible when there are diapers to change and feeding times to observe. Writing can be interrupted, though, for a few minutes, and rapid typing keeps daddies awake and alert to cries in the night.

So I started writing. And I became a writer.

Now when I go to parties, the critics stand off and look at me with eyes that say, “He’s a writer. Be careful.” Although, none of them have read my novels.

The biggest problem a writer faces is all the questions he has to answer. Not questions from the media. I like those questions. They give me a chance to answer the critics who don’t like my work. No matter how successful a writer becomes, there are always critics who don’t like his work. Questions from the media are a chance to fight back. Of course, fewer people read interviews than read the critics, but it’s about the only weapon a writer has.

I also like questions from students and people who have read my fiction. Sometimes I learn a great deal when I have to search my mind for answers to questions I’ve never thought of. I am still a critic, and I like to discover things I’ve done that were right, or wrong, or that might elevate my work to consideration as “literature.” I still believe that what the writer says isn’t as important as that which is said about him. I still believe that critics hold all the cards. But I now know that the best critic is a thoughtful reader, even when the reader doesn’t like what he reads.

But some of the questions are impossible to answer. One is, “What’s your book about?” I used to give “cute answers.” I used to say, “Oh, about $14.00,” or, “About four hundred pages long.” It might get a smile, but the question didn’t go away. The only honest response is, “Why don’t you buy a copy and find out?”

There are other nagging questions, too: “What’s it like to be a writer?”, “How can I become a writer?”, or the worst of all, “How much money do you make as a writer?” No one believes that anyone who has published a book isn’t rich and famous. The truth is that most writers haven’t made enough to cover the cost of paper and ribbons and postage; instead of being comfortable, they’re running scared.

The biggest problem a writer faces is what to write about. “Where do you get your ideas?” is the most frequently asked question of a writer and the most annoying. If I knew where I got my ideas, I would put electrified barbed wire up all around it and ring it with mine fields. I would visit it often and regularly. I might even move in and guard it personally with an army of mercenaries. The honest answer is, “I don’t know.” And that makes me sound stupid.

When I started writing my first novel I didn’t intend for it to be a novel. I was just continuing the habit I began in Mrs. McSpadden’s typing class. I was killing time, or so I thought. I wrote about what I thought I knew. I wrote about a small-town boy in a mean little town. He wasn’t I, and it wasn’t my hometown; but it was very like my hometown, especially the mean parts, and he was very like me, especially the small-town boy parts. I continued to write about the little town and the boy for a long time. Eventually, a series of stories came out of it. I put them all together along with some other stories I had written, and I sent it to New York, and the editor I sent it to liked it well enough to publish it. My editor liked my next story even better, and he published it, too. It wasn’t about a small-town boy, but it was about the same small town.

I came to like that town, and I came to hate it as well. The more things I made up about it, the truer it all seemed to me. As I kept writing about it, it didn’t seem so mean anymore, and I found that there were as many good things about it as bad. I wanted to be honest about it, though, so I kept making up things, expanding things here, shrinking things there, altering the facts of reality as I went, all the time drawing on the truth of my memory but weaving that truth into a tapestry of lies that fit my imaginary small town.

I didn’t want to sentimentalize the town. There were good people there, and, I discovered when I began to write about them, there were funny people there, too. At the time I was writing, though, I didn’t think I was a writer. I never thought anyone would read my writing. So I was frank and honest and open. It tends to make trouble for me, now. People in small towns that become the models for writers are sensitive about having their secrets—even those that are made up—revealed.

Another question writers hear a lot is, “What are you going to do next?” This is an ironic question, and I know that the inquirer has a compliment in mind when the sentence is formed, that what he really means is that he liked the first book and is looking forward to another one. But it always disturbs a writer to have someone ask “What’s next?” It’s like saying, “What have you done for me lately?”

For most writers, publishing a book, one book, is the goal of a lifetime. That quickly gives way to ambition, of course, but in the back of a writer’s mind is always the insecurity, the recollection of feeling that his book will never be published, that he will always write in a personal vacuum. Rejection is part of the business. A book, even a second book, or a third or a fourth, can be rejected by an agent, an editor, the critics, or even the public. Indeed, that sort of thing happens more often than it doesn’t. Most writers think that writing one book, or even two, should be enough. But it’s not. We live in a consumer’s society. People want more of what they like, but they usually want it to be “new and improved,” and when writing is concerned, that’s scary.

###

Personally, I often worry that I might not be able to write about the same small town again. I would like to, but that mysterious place where my ideas come from doesn’t always yield many good ones about the town, and I sometimes can’t seem to think up any new lies to tell about it. At one point, I decided to “go home,” not to my mythical town, but to the real one. I hoped that I would find something to write about there. And I did.

One of the things I found was about the history of the town and its region. I grew up there, spent eighteen years there, and the only historical incident I ever heard of that took place there was that Cynthia Ann Parker was recaptured nearby. Sul Ross was up on the Pease River killing Indian women and children one morning when, supposedly, he saw her blue eyes and took her, the wife of a chief and the mother of the “Last Chief of the Comanche,” back to her people from whom she had been captured decades earlier. She died—it’s said, of grief, but another story is that she starved herself to death—quickly after she was restored to the Christian bosom of her loved ones. People from that part of Texas, I’ve learned, even the Comanche, don’t like too much change, and history is something to be trotted out and dusted off on “Western Day.”

But history can also be full of lies. I later learned that both stories about Cynthia Ann were untrue; she most likely died of pneumonia. To this day I haven’t visited the “battle site,” though, not out of perversity, but rather because I never could find it. The historical marker was erected after I left, and I’ve never had the time to search for it. I’m told, however, that the place where they put it is actually several miles from the capture site since the Pease River changed course and the actual location is now in the wrong county.

I was undeterred by such anomalies of history, though. I started writing about the region and its settlement once more. I thought about the kind of people it took to settle an area that Cynthia Ann’s son, Quanah Parker, had said was good for nothing but “scorpions, red ants, and rattlesnakes,” a place where it could be 80 degrees and drizzling in the morning, blowing a dust storm in the afternoon, and snowing by midnight. A place where drought, flood, tornados, and wheat-killing hail, prairie fires and insect plagues vied with mesquite, Johnson grass, and scrub cedar to keep the forces of agriculture and civilization out and away long after the Comanche had given up the chore as a bad job and went to Oklahoma to raise cattle and drill for oil. I was surprised to find that buffalo used to roam all over the area, for the only buffalo I ever saw were in California. I learned that the shortest railroad in the world was once there, the Acme Tap Line. I learned that the only railroad ever owned by an Indian, the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific, was there. It was a shock to me. My father worked for the “Q” for nearly thirty years.

I also found out, again later on, that Quanah Parker never owned a dime’s worth of stock in that railroad. It was another lie.

In my first two books, I had dealt with the decline of the area. I talked about the last passenger train, the Zephyr, which came through the year after I left for college; I spoke of burned-out and boarded-up buildings; I wrote of the seamier side of life, the hidden sex, hypocrisy, and fear that gripped a community that looked fruitlessly for hope in a faith that seemed to be as ignorant of them as they were that there was a world outside their region, a world that ignored them as well. What I was learning, though, was of something else. I learned of shootouts on Main Street, of murder in remote pastures, of suicides in gas stations, of socialists who preached on street corners. I learned of a time when hope had promise to bolster it, of a place that survived a dustbowl and depression, two world wars and government farm programs, oilfield blight, used up cotton fields, and poor wheat harvests, that found their heroes in jerseys, pads, and pimples every Friday night in the fall, and that, in spite of the fact that the century-old, fieldstone buildings of downtown were crumbling around them, still believed that where they were was the best place they could be.

I realized, to my surprise, that when I grew up there, I also thought that it was the best place I could be. I hated it, certainly, in the way any youngster hates what is familiar and longs to know what lies beyond the mountains—or, in my case, beyond the Wichita River. I had seen Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio. I had dreamed of New York. I wanted to leave worse than anything. I never wanted to come back.

Through my writing, though, I returned. I discovered that there was more substance to the place than I ever thought was there, and even though I have no desire to go back, permanently, I find that I am drawn to it as a prodigal, as one who has seen the outside world and found it wanting. The urban setting may be, as some have asserted, the proper subject for contemporary fiction, but I’ve never found the grimy boulevards of metropolitan Texas to be as interesting as the dust-blown streets of my small town. Human relationships, good ones and bad ones, tend to be magnified there, and the significance of human action tends to be greater. There might be eight million stories in the naked city, but somehow none of them seems as interesting to me as the couple of hundred that can be found in my imaginary small town.

In his wonderful memoir, Lost in West Texas, Jim W. Corder calls the region that contains my towns, the real and the imaginary, “lost.” He notes that it lies on a line of demarcation that extends south through Jack County to 1-20, west to just above Abilene, and then north to the Red River and home again. It is an unknown region. Neither Caprock nor grassland, it is pockmarked with cedar breaks and river sloughs, swamps and mysterious caves, sandy, quicksand-filled rivers and badlands, gypsum that lies on the ground like snow and invades the native water to the point that soap won’t lather. Along the state highways that infrequently crisscross the region, small towns sit like starving sentinels of a bygone age, a time within living memory when farmers drove wagons and plowed with mules, and lawyers were the only ones allowed to wear vests, when no one but preachers worked on Sundays, and Saturday night filled Main Street, when salesmen traveled by train, ate in diners, and stayed in fleabag hotels and called such whistle stops “bergs” with a derisive curl of their mustachioed lips, when the only law worth worrying about was the sheriff, and when the biggest scandal anyone knew about or dared to mention was the pint bottles behind the Coke machine in the domino parlor. It was a time when the head cheerleader’s unexpected pregnancy was a cause for shame, and the worst crime a football boy could be accused of was mixing peppermint schnapps with a lime coke. It was an era when the banker was both the worst enemy and the best friend a town could have, when homosexuals were called “old bachelors” and lesbians were called “spinster sisters.” It was a time when a first kiss was a teenager’s greatest ambition—and fear, when dinner was served at noon, ice cream was hand-cranked, and Saturday afternoon meant “western,” a time when “out there” referred to a world no one understood or, truly, wanted much of anything to do with. Now much of that has changed, or has it? That’s what I wanted to come home to, that’s what I wanted to write about.

Towns in that region were “Huck Finn” kinds of places when I grew up. Only we knew of places to hunt more than fish, places to steal a melon instead of a raft. A river, to my generation, was something you could walk across, if you didn’t get stuck in quicksand. A forest was something resembling a plum thicket that had grown up in a CCC shelter-break. The first time I saw the Mississippi, I couldn’t believe it, and I’m still not sure that the Great Southern Forest is natural.

If the people there were “lost,” they didn’t know it or care very much. The only salvation they sought was in church, not in geography. If you knew how to get into Wichita Falls to shop at Sears for Christmas, over the Red River to “trash hill” to buy a pint of Oklahoma whiskey to “naughty up” the egg nog, and down to Fort Worth for the Fat Stock Show and Rodeo or to Dallas for the State Fair, that was all the direction you needed. County roads had numbers, but no one knew them. They were the “Country Club Road”, “The Groesbeck Road”, “Medicine Mound Road”, “The Lake Road”, “Wolf Hunt Road”, “Beasley’s Cave Road”, and “The Airport Road”. Who needed numbers in a place where everyone knew where he was all the time? “You go out to Connally’s farm an’ take a left at the watermelon patch.” Never mind that it’s February and a melon patch looked pretty much like any other field. If you don’t know where Connally’s melon patch was, you have no business running around the county in the first place.

At least one writer I know once said that he was a “herder of words.” I think most writers are “herders of souls.” Not shepherds—evangelism isn’t their purpose. Instead they gather souls together less for counting than for assessing. The small towns of West Texas—we always called it West Texas (it was, after all, west of Fort Worth)—are less places than they are collections of souls. Some of the best souls found peace in the cemeteries there. Some fled never to return. And some are still there. But a few who left, come back from time to time to consider the truer values of a place that’s invisible to the skiers on their way to and from the snowcaps of Colorado and street markets of Santa Fe. These, I think, are the writers, and in their return is where their ideas come from; in the lies they tell about their memories is where the truth of their fiction may be found.

###

So I decided to revisit my small town. I had been there infrequently throughout the years both before and since becoming a writer. Usually, though, I would go and “hide” at her house, secreting myself away from those who I might know or recognize. I didn’t realize it until that particular visit, but I didn’t want to see any change. I suppose I shared that with the Comanche.

During that visit, it snowed. My wife, a Yankee-bred girl who regards anyplace with fewer than two malls a small town, insisted we take a walk on an icy morning. We strolled through the “downtown” area—two brick-paved blocks of century-old buildings, most of which boast newer fronts on the street level at least. The snow hid a lot of defect and ruin from my eyes, but it also revealed something worse. I saw the old Dinner Bell Café where travelers ate while waiting for a train, and the Liberty Hotel, where thousands of weary pilgrims found a night’s rest on their journeys. Both were crumbling as was one of the two depots suffered to remain standing and spared the bulldozer and wrecking ball’s terror. I discovered a hundred-year-old building which had once been the only hotel in town. It was a warehouse of some sort for a while. Now, though, all the floors have collapsed, but the rickety wooden fire escape is still in place, testimony to the pragmatism of a by-gone era that thought any way out of a burning building was better than none, whether it was “up to code” or not.

I was disturbed by much that I saw during my snowy walk. Places I remembered were gone, shut down, boarded-up, gutted by fire or demolition, changed. There was a real estate office where my daddy took me for fifty-cent burr haircuts every June first. A dry cleaners had invaded the drugstore’s space where we used to sit in booths and drink soda-fountain Cokes and milkshakes. The Teen Canteen, which had formerly been a Church of Christ before they sold it to the city and built a new one, was boarded up. I learned to dance in there, tasted my first sip of wine in the parking lot, fell in love, had my heart broken more than once. It was in ruin, and honeysuckle vines covered the old porch where once an outraged coalition of Baptist and Church of Christ parents descended on a Valentine’s Day dance and raided it and jerked their mortified and sinful children home by their indiscreet ears while the band continued to play and the Methodists laughed. Someone had plowed up and planted a winter garden in the vacant lot where I learned to hit Tommy Nelson’s slider—if you got it over the holly hedge of Old Man Waterby’s backyard, it was a ground-rule homer, but you had to buy a new ball. I figure Old Man Waterby probably collected a couple of hundred baseballs in those days. We didn’t need Freddy Kruger or Jason. We were terrified enough of him. The rumor was that he had axe-murdered and cut up his wife and mailed her in little pieces packed in dry ice, back to her father in Tennessee, Railway Express. Everyone knew it, but because he was rich, no one would arrest him.

I saw him during that visit. He was old, frail, and kind of pathetically harmless as he inched his way down an icy walk to retrieve his Fort Worth Star Telegram. His sweater was ratty, and the house that we had all thought of as opulent and befitting a man of great wealth was in need of paint and a new roof. He had a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet rusting in the driveway. How could I have been afraid of him? I started to ask him if he still had all those baseballs, but I didn’t. I was afraid he might also still have an axe hidden away somewhere, and I remain convinced that he spends his nights counting his money.

The capper, I suppose, was walking past the high school. In small towns, life centers on the high school. My high school was a turn-of-the-century, three-story affair with hardwood floors and huge sash windows in response to a land which thought air conditioning was a dip in a stock tank and standing naked in the summer wind. There was a huge masonry arch some ancient senior class had paid to have built, and it looked like a school. But it was gone. In its place was a cold steel and yellow brick building with no windows, no expansive quad, and only one story. It had no character, no sense of tradition. Even the arch was gone.

Later that day, I visited the cemetery where my father and grandfather and other family members are buried. It too seemed cleaner, smaller, less ominous and oppressive than I remembered it. The story is that the cemetery was founded on the spot where Indians had killed and scalped a cowboy named Earle. His grave was the first one, dug before the townsite was founded. I’d never been able to find it, and I couldn’t find it under the snow that day, either. Someone had put some plastic flowers on my grandfather’s grave. They were red, once, but in the snow they looked pink and faded. The granite headstones announced dates and names, but they didn’t talk about years of back-breaking toil my father put in on an ungrateful and unforgiving railroad. My grandfather’s stone said nothing of the fact that he was a wrangler and a horseman, or that his father had fought in the War Against Northern Aggression, as my family always called it, before being burned out in Arkansas and coming to Texas to raise horses. None of the stones there, in fact, bespoke the family histories of those who lay beneath them. I knew there were good people there, bad people as well, and their lives were as much a part of the memories I had of the small town as were my own.

In short, the town wasn’t there anymore. It’s likely that it never was there, not as I remember it and imagine it in my writing. It’s as much a part of a mythic past as Old Man Waterby’s supposedly checkered life, as much a part of the fabric of imagination as the significance of a ratty, weed-grown patch of earth we called a “quad” at the high school. In my memory—and in my writing—the buildings are taller, the summers hotter, the winters colder, the winds stronger than they’ll ever be again. The people are better, and worse, than they ever were, their secrets darker, their lives entirely more interesting.

But somehow, the place still exists in my mind, and somehow, I continue to believe it’s more fascinating than the glass and steel, concrete and neon of any urban setting. In my mind, there’s more of a story to tell there than I’ll ever discover in Dallas or Houston, New York or Los Angeles. There, indiscretions and conflicts are commonplace, unremarkable, and expected. In a small town, what would be a ripple in the metropolis rolls with the force of a tidal wave as it envelopes the sensibilities and excites the outrage or admiration of all. There’s a kind of brutality there that urbanites for all their ghettos, barrios, and crime can never understand; there’s also a kind of acceptance and forgiveness that few city dwellers ever experience.

###

As a writer, then, that has been my main subject. I won’t say that I haven’t or won’t write about the cities I know, the cities I have visited. Indeed, I have set scenes already in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and New York. But I still feel obliged to tell stories about what made me become a writer in the first place, about a place that is as infinite in its variety as it is static in its sense of time and change.

So, regardless of whether they drive Porches or pickups, of whether they deal with male menopause or milo harvesting, of whether they prefer Brooks Brothers and L.L. Bean to leather jackets and bullhide boots, of whether they drink Perrier and martinis instead of Lone Star and a “Col’ Co-cola,” all writers must find their ideas in the stuff of what they know, what they have done, else, what they create will be fabricated, false. Whether they publish or not, whether they succeed or not, the motivation that must guide writers must be found in the fabric of their imaginations. It is there they will find the profits of their prose, their personal fulfillment, and it is from there they will tell their best and truest stories, relying less on the truth and more on the genuineness of their memories.

IF THEY DON’T WIN IT’S A SHAME:

BASEBALL AS MYTH AND EQUALIZER

“This is the last pure place where Americans dream.

The last great arena, the last green arena,

where everybody can learn the lessons of life.”

—Marcus Giamatti

I’ve always loved baseball, even though I haven’t always been aware of it. That is not to say that I’ve always been the fan of any particular team. Loyalties change with geography unless you grow up in a professional club’s immediate area; when I was a kid, Texas had no major league. There was the Texas League, arguably the greatest minor league source of the greatest players in the history of the game, but the “big leagues” played far away. Maybe because of that, I’ve always rooted for the underdogs. In my very distant memories, I can remember listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, but only on nights when the Fort Worth Cats were out of town. The station that broadcast the Cats’ home games wasn’t equipped to follow them on the road; when the Cats were away, it carried the Dodgers. I had no idea what part of Texas Brooklyn might be in, but I liked their scrappiness, and I felt betrayed when they abandoned Gotham for the land of sushi and tofu.

Later in my adolescence, for reasons I cannot explain, I followed the Cubs and suffered through their continuing series of heartbreaking seasons and their dedication to tradition. But the lighting of Wrigley Field darkened my enthusiasm some. I had a similar affinity for the Red Sox, largely because of Ted Williams and Carlton Fisk; but that’s now over, since the “Curse of the Bambino” has been broken. The Sox may have the pennant, but they lost their gritty glamour. The Yankees were also a dominating team of my youth; I suppose Ruth and Gehrig cast too large a shadow for latter-day players to escape: DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, Maris enlarged the Bronx Bomber legend to a point where no pretender from anywhere else could diminish it. The Georgia Peach, Stan the Man, Dizzie Dean, Hammerin’ Hank, The Texas Express and The Big Unit might be similar heroes of the diamond. But they weren’t wearing pinstripes. They didn’t play in the House that Ruth Built.

Later, professional baseball came to Texas—sort of; I mean, it was indoors and played on a rug. The Astrodome, of course. Initially, they tried to grow grass under special glass panels in the roof. It worked, but it made the field intolerably hot for the players. They took up the grass and put down plastic—Astroturf was born. Something in baseball, though, began to die.

I still tried to work up some enthusiasm for the Astros. I followed them to their mid-eighties pennant race, and I wept with them when they lost. I even pulled for them more recently, but, in the long run, nothing helped. Even new digs with real grass and a retractable roof and a freight-train fast-baller couldn’t improve their chances. When I moved nearer the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, I started out every season hanging in there with the Rangers. Their roller-coaster-ride seasons and tendency to trade away great talent that often comes back to beat them beggars enthusiasm. They seem to be dedicated to being the team that “almost was.” Even Nolan Ryan’s arrival couldn’t inspire them to overcome the handicap of having been the Washington Senators—“First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” That’s a joke only a true baseball fan understands.

In my childhood I was a much more loyal fan of the game. I played it, of course, in backyards and vacant lots, used a ratty old glove, a splintery bat, and a lopsided ball. It was a summertime staple. I could quote batting averages, RBIs and ERAs with all my friends. I knew the names and numbers of all the players, yearned to see them in their faraway parks, strained to hear the static-filled radio play-by-play, and ultimately squinted at their grainy black-and-white images on television and in Life magazine. I collected their cards, fondled them lovingly, traded them, and finally wore them out so much that they would be worthless and illegible today even if my mother hadn’t thrown them out. Like most kids my age, I loved baseball. It was an obsession.

And naturally, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to be on a regular team. There was no tee-ball then, no coach-pitch or machine-pitch. Kids started organized ball when they turned eleven or twelve. They were expected already to know the fundamentals of the game, and most did. Because the town was small, there were a limited number of teams, which meant a limited number of games and an even more limited opportunity to play in one of them. The park was a hard-packed dirt field surrounded by a splintering grandstand built decades before when there was a city team. It always seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and during one heavy windstorm, it did. Coaches, typically, were mostly dads and big brothers, mostly interested in seeing their sons and nephews play, mostly ignorant of how to manage kids. The leagues had no minimum participation rules then, so most of the players who weren’t related to a coach or one of his buddies were usually stuck “squatting in Splinter City, warming the pine.” I was among them.

In fairness, though, I never could play the game well. I could hit the ball a ton, and often where I wanted to, but since I was fat and clumsy (“Husky,” my mother said; my uniform had to be special ordered.), I was too slow to run the bases well. I could catch okay, so when I did get in a game, I was always stuck out in right field, kicking the tops off of weeds and counting odd-shaped rocks, daydreaming, until somebody accidentally hit one my way. At that point, I would wake up (too late) and chase it until it rolled dead while the batter scampered home. During my brief stint in organized youth ball, I mostly played “left bench.”

Certainly, we had no junior high team, and—football being “king”—my high school eliminated baseball from the varsity schedule long before I was born. After the grandstand blew away, they graded the old field and made it a parking lot for the football stadium. But we still played every chance we got. And in the games we organized ourselves in vacant lots and back yards, everyone got in and played all the positions. Left on their own, kids seemed to have an innate sense of fairness and a democratic distribution of fun. (One old coach I know opined that probably the best thing that could happen to youth league baseball would be the mandatory posting of signs on all ballpark gates: “No parents allowed.”) We all—boys, girls, all ages, even the kid crippled by polio—played.

I remember one neighborhood game in particular: Tommy Hatcher’s backyard. A gravel street and a bar ditch ran through the outfield, and a home run was anything over the Brownlow’s fence, since the gate was always locked. Home plate was under a chinaberry tree, and first base backed up to a barn, so you couldn’t overrun it. We started early on a Saturday morning and played till full dark. There were no coaches, just kids managing by fiat and keeping meticulous account of batting orders. Dads, though, officiated. My father umpired for a while, so did Tommy’s, and other dads from the neighborhood drifted over and took turns calling balls and strikes, safes and outs. There were no rhubarbs, although a lot of calls were loudly disputed. Mothers brought out Kool-Aid and homemade cookies. The teams changed as kids came and went to do chores, eat dinner, go get haircuts or a new pair of Buster Browns; but on each side, a nucleus stayed the same. We played fifty-two innings. I don’t remember the score. It wasn’t important, wasn’t the point. The point was the game, itself. It was like school, like church, like visiting the old folks on Sunday afternoons. Baseball was something we just did.

###

Somewhere between that great series of Southwest Conference Football Championships racked up by UT and the Dallas Cowboys’ series of Super Bowl triumphs, I sort of lost interest in baseball. Even then, though, I was never comfortable when some beer-soaked, triple-chinned gridiron fan asserted that the NFL had replaced the American and National Leagues as the purveyors of the National Pastime. Tom Landry’s Cowboys might call themselves “America’s Team,” but I knew in my heart that they would never replace the fun-to-hate Yankees, no matter what one thought of George Steinbrenner.

Football fans were, I suspected, ignoring an observable fact: A sweaty light-dozen muscular hulks in plastic armor running around once a week on a polyethylene carpet under a climate controlled ceiling could never replace the sweet symmetry and gentle grace of a baseball team. No football field and its crowded, raucous din could substitute for the aroma of grass on a diamond on a summer evening and the soughing ripple of conversations in the outfield bleachers. No football squad, hunkered down and muscled up on a striped grid could rival the sight of a bunch of lithe and limber guys standing with casual ease around a perfectly manicured diamond, scratching their crotches, spitting tobacco juice, and trying not to daydream until a hard liner shoots toward them and they sprint swiftly to snatch it from the air and smoothly fire it back to a teammate for an easy out. No football play with its body blocks and shoe-string tackles could ever match the charm and grace of nine men moving perfectly together like parts of a well-oiled machine. No marching band could match the steady rhythm of an organ building tempo for a key pitch. Football—and its attendant indoor imitator, basketball—could never be pastimes. They were for fanatics. Baseball was for fans.

The arguments, however, became more pointed.

“Baseball,” a friend of mine asserted back in the mid-seventies, “is ten minutes of excitement crammed into three hours.”

“You just don’t understand it,” I argued. I became the kid I once was, picking up a timeworn gauntlet. “Look: there’s a pitcher and a batter. That’s the focus. The pressure is always there, first pitch to last out. The fielders, the catcher, the umpires—everyone else becomes integral to that center stage of dramatic action. From the wind-up to the swing, everything hinges on those two guys: who they are, their records, their tendencies, what they might or might not do. Every play is different, every situation unique. Prediction is only speculation. On every pitch, everything changes priority—the count, the score, the inning, who’s on base, who’s on deck, who’s in the bullpen—and it keeps right on changing, for twenty-seven outs, unless the score is tied. Then it changes again. It changes until somebody wins. It is exciting, damnit!”

He laughed. “I’d rather watch golf.”

I couldn’t see how anyone could fail to understand the sublime intensity of a ball hurtling toward a strike zone at nearly 100 miles per hour while a man with a round piece of wood in his hand attempted to “hit it where they ain’t.” It was raw ability versus raw strategy, timing vying with confidence, concentration pitted against focus. It was the only game in which the defense controlled the ball, for God’s sake. Baseball, I continued to argue, required intelligence to play. Instinct is secondary, talent is secondary. Even athletic ability is secondary. As one first baseman put it not long ago when he was accosted by a female reporter because of his unathletic, unhealthy habits, “Lady, I’m no athlete. I’m a baseball player.” Baseball is a game that’s played in the mind as it’s worked out on the diamond. What counts is the player’s mental alacrity, his ability to think at least three moves ahead, to know what to do in the event that any of a hundred of a thousand possibilities unfold with the rapidity of the swing of a bat.

I also pointed out that the most often asked question by fans at a football or basketball game is, “What happened?” But I forgot about instant replay on modern scoreboards. “There’s nothing in baseball to match a two-minute drill,” my friend contended in rebuttal. “Or a draw play that works, or a Razzle-Dazzle, or a Hail Mary, or a broken play that brings fans to their feet, or an end-run that breaks out behind a wall of blockers.” His basketball fan buddies made similar arguments for a fast break or inside hookshot or three-point field goal from mid-court. We didn’t even get into hockey.

I had to admit that a routine double-play, a hit-and-run, sacrifice fly, or intentional walk didn’t quite measure up, ordinarily, to those flurries of action. Even a close play at the plate, a diving catch at the warning track, or a suicide squeeze couldn’t really offer such excitement. Figuring the match-ups of lefty versus righty, pitching changes, and pinch-hitting all took time and slowed the pace. I confessed to myself that the specter of twenty-two men slamming their well-padded bodies against each other in fury every twenty-five seconds has more innate appeal than nine guys in knee-britches kicking the tops off of weeds, scratching and spitting, and waiting for something to happen. In theory, baseball is a noncontact sport that depends on developing strategy more than reactive response. So maybe it wasn’t America’s game, after all. Americans have never been all that much interested in strategy or response.

“Kicking butts and taking names,” my friends insisted. “That’s the American way.”

###

I knew they were wrong, but I had no more arguments to muster. I hadn’t kept up with the game for years. I didn’t know any of the current players besides those whose names were in the news, more often than not because of some crime or scandal or outrageous money deal. So I tried watching a few innings on television, the estimable Game of the Week program. It was a revelation. I was shocked to realize that in the decades gone by, somehow, the players had all become mere boys, ten-to-fifteen years younger than I. Some of them didn’t look as if they shaved more than once a week. What, I wondered, happened to those old guys who used to be so formidable? Where were the baggy, woolen uniforms, the jowly pitchers, the stocky catchers? They all shaved every day, it seemed, and some were clearly having their hair styled. Who designed those odd little O.D.-style caps they were wearing? What was up with the plastic batting helmets? When did they stop chewing tobacco, smoking in the dugout? Where did those garishly colored uniforms come from? Why did their pant legs go down over their ankles, hiding their stockings and stirrups? Where was the umpire’s heavy balloon-style chest-protector? What was all this noise about designated hitters and free agency, and when did they start sliding into the bases head first? (My Little League coach would have benched me for that, had he not had me permanently on the bench, anyway.)

The game had changed. I couldn’t understand it. I decided that maybe my friends were right. Maybe baseball had died and nobody but football fans knew it.

Even though I hadn’t kept up, I had never completely lost interest in the game. I played a little softball in graduate school—casual competitions tied to Sunday afternoon barbeques and beer-drinking. But that wasn’t baseball. Then, when we moved near Houston I decided to renew my interest in the professional game by attending a few in the Astrodome. But, somehow, that wasn’t baseball, either. Baseball was never meant to be played indoors. I’m not terribly sure it was meant to be played at night. Wind, sun, humidity, soggy fields are as much a part of the game as bats and balls. In the Dome, everything was controlled; there were no natural variables. The lights were subdued and carefully aimed so they wouldn’t blind a fielder; and when the bat met the ball, it didn’t Crack! with that wonderful snapping surety that signals a hit. It only mushed. The noise from the huge scoreboard was distracting, and people were wandering around all over the place when they weren’t doing “the wave.” Almost no one was watching the game.

There were cheerleaders there, too. Cheerleaders for baseball?! Vendors in the stands; yes, some batboys; maybe a mascot; but cheerleaders? Cheerleaders belonged on a gridiron. You don’t cheer baseball. You root! You shout, curse, groan, whine, taunt, applaud and boo and yell for another beer or a hotdog. You just don’t cheer. (“Get a hit, Get a hit, Biiiig hit!”? C’mon.) The field had been used the previous evening by the Houston Oilers in a preseason contest, and the yard lines were still dimly in place, ruining the diamond’s purity. The groundsmen seemed to spread the dirt around the bags with a desultory attitude, as if fearful of getting it on the carpet. The stands were empty by the bottom of the sixth, even though it was a close game. Houston traffic can be murder; it and everything else was killing baseball!

My attempt to update myself in averages and statistics failed, also. There were more teams now, three full divisions. My few friends who remained avid fans were so full of data that my mind swam trying to keep up with it all. Players seemed to change teams more often than they changed sanitaries. They didn’t even try to stay in the same league. The money was huge, and there was more talk of owners and managers than of players. Corked bats and juiced balls were in the news; so were gambling and steroids.

I continued to try to watch games on television, but that was no less frustrating. The announcers were mostly former NFL stars who couldn’t tell a slider from a sinker. One kept talking about “ground-rule homers.” One color-commentator had been a player. He related four times all the details of his best season—1972—when he was a second-string catcher for the Phillies. He talked a good deal about the records the current game was in no danger of breaking and announced upcoming sitcom plots and television specials while he ignored what was happening down on the field. There were commercials following every at-bat, it seemed. Sometimes, during the count the screen filled with some logo for some sponsor, and the pitcher’s background had become a rotating billboard. Because of “network discretion,” the cameras refused to show a rhubarb kicked up between a manager and the first-base umpire that resulted in a fight that turned into a bench-clearing melee and caused the ejection of four players. That’s part of baseball, too, and television was spoiling it.

Radio broadcasts were about the same, although I’m convinced you can “see it better” on radio, since the announcers at least have to glance down at the field now and then to keep listeners reminded of why they tuned in. But in both media, the announcers kept forgetting about the contest in front of them and comparing obscure details of each player’s personal life, contract status, and latest movie appearance or arrest record. My interest faded again. I decided that my first suspicion was right: Baseball in America was dead.

Then my son was born.

###

Don’t misunderstand. I was never one of those new fathers who ran out and bought bat, ball, and glove for an infant who couldn’t yet focus. In fact, I wasn’t that sure I wanted him playing baseball, ever. Organized baseball, I knew from experience and observation, could be a cruel experience, one that could destroy a kid’s self-confidence and create an instinctive sense of self-loathing that would last a lifetime. Neighborhood ball may have been a summertime staple for me, but in latter days, there were no safe vacant lots, and backyards were tiny plots too small for a game of one-eyed cat or even to have a catch with a friend. Kids either played league ball or they didn’t play at all.

The downside of what had happened to organized baseball was vivid to me. Soon after we first married, Judy and I lived directly across the street from a schoolyard diamond. On summer nights, we could sit out in our backyard and hear the shouts and curses of a balding, paunchy coach wearing Spandex shorts and golf shoes screaming at his diminutive fielders to “Run, #%&$@#*%!”, “Get down in front of the #$%!(#@ ball!”, “If that’s the way you hustle, I’d hate to see you take a @%#&!” or “You gonna throw the @%$#*$@ ball or $%&# it?” This was just tee-ball, and some of the players were in diapers only three years before. Memories of my own bench-warming days—interrupted only by infrequent banishment to right field where I stood around kicking the tops off of weeds and waiting for my chance to blow it—combined with more contemporary observations to convince me to seek other avenues for my infant’s athletic endeavors.

Accordingly, a few years later I enrolled my son in soccer. I erected a basketball goal, interested him in fishing, swimming, and even started him with tennis lessons. I tried for nine years to keep baseball a secret, and I desperately hoped that he also would never discover football.

This, I know, to a Texan is heresy. In Texas, football is synonymous with sport; it’s also synonymous with religion for a great many people in the state. But football to a college-fund-conscious father means orthopedist and orthodontist bills. It also means sitting quietly in the stands while some bruiser bounces your baby boy all over the ground just for the hell of it. Plus, I knew well that whatever verbal abuse our neighboring baseball coach heaped out on his young charge was nowhere nearly so brutal as the articulated vituperation that routinely spewed forth from even a Peewee League football coach’s mouth.

When my son turned nine, though, things changed, and the shift took me completely by surprise. I think the sudden rush of baseball films, The Natural, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, even the silly Major League laid the groundwork. Still, these films were more about how baseball was, rather than how it had become, but they stirred something in me. For some reason, I read David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49, Heywood Broun’s The Sun Field and Ring Lardner’s Alibi Ike and You Knew Me Al. I found Valentine Davis’s It Happens Every Spring and Rhubarb. One day, I was down at the video rental store asking if they had Pride of the Yankees or Kill the Umpire. In sum, I was reawakening to the ideal activity of heading out to the park to buy a hotdog, sip a beer, and engage in something that was and always will be peculiarly American.

But books and movies were too far removed to move me into serious reevaluation. Instead, the whole thing came home to me one spring night as I returned from an out-of-town meeting. It was a long roadtrip across the state, and just after sundown, I found myself on a lonely stretch of West Texas interstate, looking for a place to pull off and get a bite to eat. As I took the next exit ramp toward a crossroads and a less-than-promising truck stop, I spotted a familiar pool of light off in the distance, about a mile away: a baseball field. Impulsively, I steered off the blacktop and onto a chalice drive that wound around some abandoned and rusting farm equipment, past a small grove of mesquite, and into a makeshift parking lot paved with chugholes and boulders the size of compact cars. All the vehicles—pickups, mostly—were covered in red dust. Two sets of rickety bleachers were lined up behind a chickenwire and hurricane fence backstop, which was flanked on either end by ramshackle benches in open dugouts.

There was a portable concession stand that offered nearly icy hotdogs—mustard, but nothing else for condiments—stale buns and watery soft drinks. I waded through boot-scuffing gravel over to the counter and ordered two dogs and a package of well-crushed potato chips. No napkins. I carried my supper to a vacant spot on the bleachers and watched two teams of twelve-year-olds battling in the bottom of the last inning. The stands were full of people, but they were utterly silent. On both sides of the infield, parents and friends, siblings and cousins sat literally on the edges of the splintery seats, fists clenched, brows furrowed, eyes riveted on the youths poised for action on the dimly lit dirt field on the other side of the chain link. The red team was at bat; there were two on, two out, and the count was full, the score tied. Cries of “You can do it!” rivaled other calls: “One more, son—just one more!” “C’mon Brad, it only takes one.” “See the ball, hit the ball.” “Rock an’ fire, Mike, rock an’ fire. Just let him hit it!” “Take him downtown, Brad!” “Come get him, Mike! Nothin’ but BBs! Put him inna book!” “Park one, Brad!”

The warring fans were unmindful of each other, although their rivals might be sitting next to them, might even be members of the same family from all I could tell. Every eye, every mind was focused on the dusty red field before them.

In each dugout, coaches wearing jeans, workboots, and gimmecaps with tractor logos crouched, surrounded by players, all faces turned toward the moment in front of them. As if willing the outcome, every heart and mind was intensely alert.

On the mound, the blue pitcher leaned in to take the sign. His face was smeared with dirt, as was his jersey. The knee of his pants was torn wide open, exposing a bloody knee. His mouth was set in a determined sneer, his hand kneaded the ball as he ground it into his thigh, his cap-shaded eyes slanted in furtive study of his catcher’s digital signs. Behind him, seven players were bent at the waist, up on their toes, gloves out in front of them, their eyes and minds focused on the moment about to unfold. The red batter was in his crouch, bat waving over his right shoulder, his fingers loose on the handle, his spikes planted, waiting.

The pitcher stretched and delivered, the runners started, the batter swung, the fielders moved, and the red-stained orb arched high over the outfield, seeming to gather speed as it roped away toward the barbed-wire fence and the mesquite thicket beyond, while a loan outfielder, glove outstretched, sprinted for all he was worth to the junction to try to intercept the ball before it crossed the line forever. In automatic unison, everyone stood up. I joined them, unaware I was doing it, blissfully ignorant of the dollop of mustard that fell from a half-eaten hotdog onto my shirt. For a moment, all was breathlessly quiet, only the galloping runners’ spikes broke the stillness while both sides of the bleachers silently beseeched the gods of baseball for contradictory miracles. But there could only be one. “That’s gone,” I heard a voice near me whisper in dismay. “See ya!” another voice answered in delight.

In seconds, there was pandemonium. Cars and trucks I hadn’t noticed before were flashing their lights and honking their horns. Half the fans were jumping up and down, hugging one another, slapping themselves on the back while the other half flung their mitts on the ground and groaned in anguished dismay. Half the players were mobbing the hero, tossing their caps in the air and flinging equipment around in a joy that was as pure as it was gracious, while half stood shocked with defeat, not mortified, but quietly proud of an effort that, while disappointing, was still noble.

As I went back to my car, I realized that I was stunned, humbled by what I’d witnessed. My brief, vicarious participation in the moment was nothing short of uplifting, nothing less than inspiring. Shirts can be laundered. Boots can be polished. Experiences like that couldn’t be replaced.

As I drove away, I spied the opposing fans gathering together around pickup beds, pulling out previously secreted caches of beer and passing them around, laughing and joking, boasting and bragging, reliving the whole game all over again. I realized that they’d replay that night for years.

The teams, likewise, red and blue, were co-mingling, talking amiably, sharing a bond that nothing else could have forged. I realized that what I had witnessed was far more than a game, far more than a contest between two kids’ teams. This wasn’t just a pastime; it was a metaphor for life. It was baseball.

###

Now, I felt compelled to give baseball another chance, to attend another major league game. And naturally, I had to take my son. To do otherwise might have been abusive. We went to see the Rangers, and I was able to experience the game from a different perspective. I laid out for the expensive seats, right behind the dugout. That night, my boy fell in love with the players. He called them “awesome.”

But more than that, there was the “awesome” feeling of being in the stands, surrounded by thousands of other people who had unashamedly plunked down a good deal of hard cash to sit on uncomfortable seats and sip extraordinarily expensive beer, munch a cold hotdog, and gaze up occasionally at a humid summer sky while they casually watched a boy’s game being played by grown men. Before I knew it, we were rooting, whining, crying, and yelling. And we were having the time of our lives. It didn’t matter that the Rangers lost miserably. Nothing mattered beyond the experience itself. It was just the moment, I told myself. Parental bonding. Or was it?

That season we started watching the majors on TV with some regularity. I gradually realized that I was doing more than explaining the fundamentals of the game to my nine-year-old. I was proselytizing him. If I couldn’t convince my friends that this was a great game, I decided, perhaps my son would join me in my faith that this was, truly, the only game worth the name.

When he turned ten, he asked for a baseball and bat. This surprised me, some, because he was developing into a fairly decent goaltender—and he was also acquiring some skill on the tennis court. My intention had been to instill in him a love of baseball, but as a fan, not as a player. Still, his mother took him to the store to spend some of his birthday money on the necessary implements. I didn’t go along. I still wasn’t sure this was wise.

When they came home, they had something resembling a bat; it even had “Louisville Slugger” printed on it. But it was not anything like any bat I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t made of ash or hickory. Rather, it was constructed of aluminum, an abomination in my view, equal to domed stadiums and ballparks that stopped selling beer after the seventh inning. It also cost what I regarded as a small fortune. I protested, but Judy explained that aside from tee-ball bats, there were no wooden bats for sale. I didn’t believe her, so I took it back, prowled the aisles of the sporting goods store and demanded to know where the “real bats” were. “These are ‘real bats,’ ” the pimply sales clerk told me. “What’d’ya want? Wood?”

Yes, I wanted wood. I wanted a real baseball bat. None was for sale.

When I returned, what I had to do was obvious. I wasn’t eager to use this metal atrocity, but it was his—he paid for (most of) it, and he had a bright new glove that needed to be broken in. We went out to a nearby vacant lot to shag some balls.

Now, it had been some twenty-five years since I’d applied lumber to horsehide. I was never very good at hitting my own tosses. But I was determined. Besides, my son was watching my every move. I put the ball high in the air, came around with a full swing, and knocked one out there about a hundred-fifty feet. High over my small son’s head, a line drive that would, if the fielder hadn’t been on top of it, have been a base hit in any ball park. All I could say was, “Wow.”

Again, don’t misunderstand. I know I tossed the ball. I know I was using an aluminum bat. I know I had a tightly wound, brand-new youth model baseball that probably had extra spring. But it wasn’t the distance, the gentle arc of the ball as it sailed out our imaginary infield, the long fast bounce and roll that made it exciting. It was just the feel of it. I couldn’t wait to do it again, but as I came to my senses, I saw the admonishment in my son’s eyes. That wasn’t fair.

My next three “hits”—two soft flies and a slow grounder for him to catch and field—only served to intensify my initial sensation, and the more we played, the better the whole thing became. I began to understand something else about the game, something I had forgotten from my sandlot play of years ago, something that anyone who loves the game knows: Baseball is infinitely adaptable. You don’t need a perfectly manicured diamond—you don’t even need a real field. You don’t need nine players—two will do nicely. You don’t need the best or even the proper equipment—any old bat and ball will do. You don’t even need to keep score or worry about who’s ahead. At bottom, there’s something almost spiritual about it. It’s baseball, and that’s all that it needs to be. It’s like the smell of hamburgers on the grill, the sign of a color guard in a Fourth of July parade, the feel of a first date’s hand in the movies, the taste of a fresh-cut watermelon: Baseball.

I also discovered that there’s utterly nothing I’ve ever experienced more satisfying than a clean hit of a baseball with a bat, even a metal bat.

My last shot ended our workout. Overcome with the moment, I lined one out of the lot, over a hedgerow and into a neighbor’s backyard greenhouse. We fled the field, laughing in our panic, with my promise to replace the ball ringing in my ears like an echo from childhood.

In a way, I was not only running away from embarrassment. I was running back to baseball. Four years later, I was encouraging my son’s play, preparing him take his position on the high school varsity squad. I had learned that organized ball didn’t have to be an abusive and demoralizing experience. With caring coaches who teach the game and all its benefits, there was a quality about it that taught lessons in patience, sacrifice, and grace that no other game could offer. There was nothing for it. Baseball was still there, and I was right back with it.

###

Each year, now, as spring paces through the heat of summer toward the frost of October and the year’s inevitable celebration of “the end”—The World Series, of course—as scandals and gambling and drugs and rumors of corked bats and juiced balls float around the game like predatory birds, as fickle fans abandon losing clubs while the curious and opportunistic swarm into stadiums on the off-chance that the local team might have a shot at a pennant or some star player might set a record, while the insanely loyal continue to hope when there is no hope, to believe just because they have faith, I reaffirm my conviction that baseball is the only purely American game. It endures. Lockouts, walkouts, superstars and super salaries cannot harm it. It’s impervious to criticism, resistant to cynicism, and supremely complacent in its conviction of its own rightness. Blemishes and bruises fade over time, but the game continues.

I admit that, as a game, it may be slow at times, but when I consider the many NFL or collegiate games I’ve watched on television, when a 36-14 score at the start of the fourth quarter signaled only a sluggish, metronomic automation of four-down series, one following the other while the clock ticks and the announcers encourage viewers to stay tuned for the next game to be broadcast, I realized that there is in baseball something that sets it apart and makes it a true reflection of the American character. In baseball, as in no other game, anything can happen at any moment, right up to the last swing at the last pitch of the last inning. To paraphrase the much-abused quote from dear old Yogi, the contest for which sport is truly the American pastime ain’t nearly over.

Basketball, hockey, soccer, and, of course, football are fast-moving sports with tremendous action and rapid shifts, sometimes, in the fortunes of the teams. There’s also the added dimension of violence in some games, often, it seems, by design. And, there are the sexy cheerleaders, the marching bands, the pomp and circumstance of attendant rituals. But baseball offers something more than a mere competition between competing squads. It’s simple but balanced mathematics—the square within the circle, nine players, nine innings, three outs, three strikes, four balls, four bases. The formula, though complex, provides order in the midst of chaos, serenity in the midst of storm.

In fashion with our ideals, it’s a democratic sport, open to players of all statures, all ethnic or racial backgrounds, and of a wide range of ages and abilities. Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a major league contest between two pennant contenders, or a pick-up game among neighborhood kids on a vacant lot, the game remains the same. In what other sport can a ten- or twelve-year-old go out onto a field and play precisely the same game as the professionals play and always have played? Kids who play baseball aren’t imitating their elders; they’re preparing to join them.

From top to bottom, the game remains consistent, constant. It slows down action to an observable but unpredictable pace; it demonstrates that even in a world where collective might is often perceived as the only answer to adversity, there is still some place where individual effort, singular ability, and lonely bravery count; where errors are only temporary indiscretions, for heroism can be restored. It’s the only endeavor I know of where the strongest is routinely asked to sacrifice himself for the sake of the weaker for the benefit of the whole. And throughout the play, the strategy centers on one goal: to get home. Perhaps most significantly, it underscores the notion that nothing is ever sure or secure without vigilance and focus and that anything can change the outcome right up to the very end. In a word, baseball offers hope; what other sport can make a claim that is more important?

When a pitcher takes the mound and batter takes his box, when the infield goes into its crouch, and the umpire bends over to study the zone, when the aroma of a summer night is augmented by the fragrance of grass and the bouquet of cold beer and hot peanuts, when the tartness of mustard-soaked hotdogs and dill pickles is complemented by the chorus of fans heckling and rooting, and when the unique sound of ash on horsehide cracks out and ignites a conflagration of vocal approval, something magical is happening: Baseball.

It’s a fantasy, perhaps, a myth, but it says something about the way America was, the way America is. And so long as the grass grows and the wind blows and fly balls get lost in the sun, it will continue to say something about the way America can be.

OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

“When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Not long ago, around a table at a hotel restaurant during a writer’s conference, a fellow conferee began talking about how much she liked Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. She said her favorite scene was the one where the young cowboy falls off his horse into a nest of water moccasins while he’s crossing the Canadian River. She declared that the scene moved her so much because her husband, a rural-reared lad from Oklahoma, had an uncle who died in precisely the same way.

“Oh?” I responded. I should have kept my mouth shut.

“Yes,” she said. “He was swimming in the Arkansas River, and he swam into a nest of water moccasins and was bitten to death.” She sat back, warming to the telling. “He went into the water, then he started screaming. But no one could tell what was wrong.” Her eyes widened, her tone became lower, more sinister. “Then he climbed out onto the bank, and they could see the snakes.” She paused for dramatic effect, then nearly whispered, “They were hanging off of his whole body like living ropes.” She sat back and folded her arms, immensely satisfied with the horrified expressions on her fellow diners’ faces.

I, though, only smiled. “I don’t think so,” I said.

She fixed me with a glare. “He saw it happen,” she insisted. “My husband saw it, too. They were working cattle.” She looked around the table and explained sadly, “He was only a boy.”

“It didn’t happen,” I said, laughing. “It couldn’t.”

She was angry now: defensive. “Are you calling my husband a liar?”

“No,” I said, wondering how big her husband was and if he had a temper. “I don’t doubt that he believes that it happened, even believes he saw it happen. But I can assure you, it didn’t happen.”

“And just how would you know?”

“Because,” I said, looking around for support among the urbanite crowd surrounding us; most were giving me annoyed looks. “For one thing,” I continued, undaunted, “water moccasins don’t bite and hang on. They strike. ‘Sting’ is the proper term. Technically, they’re vipers.” She stared at me. “And for another, they can’t strike under water.”

“Well, it happened,” she sniffed indignantly. “My husband was there, and he said so.” She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the conference.

The point, of course, is that the story is part of the fabric of American folklore. When I was about twelve, Ken Kirkendall, our Sunday School teacher from the First Baptist Church, bravely agreed to take five of us boys out to a nearby creek for our first overnight camp-out—sans peres. Typically, we had no sooner built our campfire and wolfed down lukewarm bowls of canned chili than we began sniggering over mildly pornographic jokes, scatological anecdotes, and tales of quasi-erotica, most of which we had learned from the older boys during Sunday night’s Training Union classes.

Horrified by our puerile declamations, Mr. Kirkendall tried to divert us with ghost stories, but we had heard most of those already, so he shifted to a “true story” guaranteed to scare us. He told us the tale of a friend of his who had gone swimming in the Brazos River back when he was a boy and who had swum into a submerged “nest of water moccasins” and had been bitten to death. The details were more specific and more graphic than those of my writer acquaintance’s husband’s story, better designed to shock and terrify small boys; but the particulars were the same: No one could tell what was wrong with the victim, who was a good swimmer, until he began thrashing about in the water and screaming. Then he climbed out onto the bank, revealing a body alive with clinging, poisonous snakes; he was dead before anyone could help him, and so forth.

I utterly believed the story at the time; I believe to this day that Ken Kirkendall believed it, as well.

The next time I heard the story was only a few years later, at Glorieta, New Mexico, on another church-related outing: the Baptist Youth Camp held there every summer. This time, the taleteller was from Colorado, and the river was the North Platte, or a slough near the bank thereof, and the poisonous serpents weren’t water moccasins but rattlesnakes. The rest of the story was about the same, only it wasn’t a friend, but a hunting companion of a cousin who stepped into a “pit of snakes.” Death of the unfortunate soul was the end of the story, though, and I remember thinking how remarkable it was that two such incidents could occur in such similar ways. It never occurred to me that a fellow Baptist might not be utterly truthful.

Doubt was born, even so, as I heard the story at least twice more before I left high school. Once, while visiting distant cousins in Bowling Green, Kentucky, it was the explanation for the cause of death of a great-uncle of mine who fell out of a fishing boat while trolling on the Green River. This time, the snakes were “water adders,” whatever they might be; I heard it also from another cousin from California who was visiting Texas and typically bragging about the superlative nature of the Sunshine State’s waterways in comparisons to Texas’s murky streams. In a challenge to establish which state had the “deadliest” river, his version of the story served as evidence of his home state’s unquestionable claim to the distinction. The details, though, were more or less the same. Water moccasins were again the poisonous serpents, death was the result of the misadventure, and it happened to someone he knew very well.

The tale next came to my attention when I was in college as part of the folklore of Vietnam. I read or heard it related no fewer than five times as an incident that took place in a Southeast Asian jungle stream, always involving some exotic poisonous reptile or other, and always containing the same particulars. In doing some subsequent research as well as idle reading for a course in American military history, I ran across the same incident as a feature of several armed conflicts. Supposedly, the events took place in the swamps of the Carolinas (American Revolution), the everglades of Florida (Creek-Indian Wars), the flooded mountain streams surrounding Mexico City (Mexican War), the bayous of Louisiana (Civil War), the resacas of Cuba and the rainforest rills of the Philippines (Spanish-American War), the Nile River (World War I), and on no fewer than three islands of the South Pacific in World War II. During this last conflict, at least one incident took place in a salt-water lagoon; instead of snakes, the deadly submarine menace was an eel of some sort.

Curiously, I’ve found no mention of such an event during the Korean Conflict; perhaps there are no poisonous reptiles in Korea. Thus far, it hasn’t arisen in the Gulf War, and tragically, the book isn’t yet complete on the War in Iraq, both conflicts occurring in regions where water if not amphibious reptiles are more scarce. It seems, though, that wherever Americans are tempted to venture into a flowing stream, they run the danger of emerging festooned with poisonous serpents. Almost always, the story is presented as a verifiable fact, and in every case there is a more or less unimpeachable witness to attest to the veracity of the account.

###

Not long after I began teaching in a university, a colleague presented me with a short story written by a friend of his who resides in New England. The story had been published in a fairly well-known literary magazine, and it concerned some boys off on a summer swimming lark in some remote lake in Maine. One of the boys, anxious to claim the right to be the first in the water, throws off his clothes, seizes a rope someone had thoughtfully left dangling from a high tree branch, and swings enthusiastically out over the lake and into the water.

“Don’t come in!” he screams to his companions as he founders and thrashes in the water. He makes his way toward the bank, and, as in all previous versions, comes out draped with snakes—in this case, something called “tree asps.” Frustrating as would be any search for the identity of any snake such as the “tree asp,” of which none are specified in biology texts as being peculiar to North America or anywhere else in the world, nothing about this version was more curious to me than a brief dedication at the opening of the story: “For Dave, who really died this way.”

Well, not to be mean about it, “Dave” didn’t die that way. He might have died as the result of a swimming accident in a lake. He might even have been stung or struck by some semi-venomous creature indigenous to New England. But he didn’t die because of hundreds or even dozens of bites inflicted by submerged reptiles any more than did McMurtry’s hapless (and utterly fictional) cowboy.

I am not and do not pretend to be a herpetologist or even an armchair expert on snakes. Indeed, I have a West Texans’ natural aversion to reptiles of any sort. And I’ll confess that it’s entirely possible that something called a “tree asp” can and did bite some boy in a lake in Maine, or wherever. But by this point, I had heard or read about the story in so many different versions that I was convinced that none of them ever happened. This was nothing more than a tall tale, something not far removed from stories of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, accounts of mysterious ghost lights and UFOs, the sorts of things that have often been collected in a variety of volumes dedicated to cataloguing “urban legends,” even though all of the versions of this particular tale have distinctively rural settings.

But when I informed my Yankee friend of my doubts as to the accuracy of the reported details of “Dave’s” demise and listed a few supporting facts from my reading on snaky biology as well as the story’s frequent appearance, I discovered that the subject was a sore one. He hotly claimed that certainly snakes could strike (or sting) under water, and he was offended that I doubted his friend’s veracity. He averred that I was merely jealous of a prestigiously published piece of fiction and upset that I hadn’t thought of it first. (Actually, I had “thought” of it first, or at least beforehand; it had been brought to my attention often enough, that I had come to regard it as far too hackneyed to work as a fictional element—McMurtry proved me wrong, of course.) But then, in his fulminating resentment of my response, my down-easter friend took matters a step further.

“I know it happened, because I was there,” he declared. “I was one of the boys in the story. I saw it happen!” Then he snatched the story from my hand and stalked away. Later, he left academics and became an attorney, and I wondered what role I might have played in that decision.

###

When McMurtry’s book came out, I thought that the fictionalized treatment of the tale in a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, combined with its graphic depiction in a television miniseries, would finally dampen the story’s veracity—as a tale. After all, McMurtry made no claim as to any historical foundation for the story; he presents it as a set piece of a larger fiction. But as my more recent experience at the writer’s conference demonstrated, the publication and broadcast of the story’s particulars seemed to have fueled a new blaze of enthusiasm for telling it; as before, each version is grounded in the virtually sworn testimony of an eye-witness account.

I thought about trying to trace the story to its source, but a bit of library work quickly convinced me that this was a fool’s errand. Those published accounts involving warfare episodes left me at dead ends. None made it into any official reports I could locate. Other versions were rendered in either a fictional or reportorial setting, even though many of them relied on specific witnesses to support the truth of the revealed facts. None led me to an earlier version. It was almost as if the tale slithered full-grown and in full-scale, as it were, from the gnarly forehead of American culture. And each of its proponents was implicitly prepared to do battle to defend it as being both original and unquestionably true.

The facts of the matter—if facts they are—are no easier to establish than the source of the story itself. After reading as extensively as I could stand about snakes and their habits, I consulted two zoologists who specifically disagreed on the point of whether venomous reptiles such as water moccasins could strike under water. The first, an assistant director of a major metropolitan zoo, claimed in a distinctively British accent that they could, but he was quick to point out that they never clustered or nested under water. “They hang about in trees,” he said, “near ponds or lakes or sluggish, nearly stagnant streams. They can swim, but they’re not good at it, and even a moderate current would be decidedly unpleasant for them.”

My second expert, a professor of biology with no accent at all, said that if a snake or any semi-amphibious reptile opened its mouth wide enough to strike and inject venom under water, it would drown. “All poisonous snakes in North America are vipers. Pit vipers, for the most part,” he said. “Some swim, but they’re not true amphibians, and they don’t belong to the same class as amphibious reptiles such as alligators, turtles, and frogs. You can drown any of those, too, he noted, if you force their mouths open under water. For that matter, you can drown a fish.”

I asked him specifically about water moccasins. He defined them properly: acinstrodon piscivorous, phylum chroradata, class reptilia, sub-phylum vertebrata, order squamata, family crotalidae. “They’re quite common throughout the South and Southwest, with varieties in Central and South America, and they’ve been observed as far north as Canada,” he said, adding, “They’re poisonous, but truly not that deadly. Not like a rattler or a coral snake.” He wasn’t prepared to go on record and say that it was impossible for someone to swim into a “nest” of water moccasins and be struck, but he was certain that the strikes and bites would have to be administered above the surface of the water.

“Can they feed under water?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They really don’t go into the water much. Their young are born live, and they don’t cluster or nest except during hibernation.”

I told him of a childhood experience I had. I was bass fishing out of a rowboat on a small, man-made lake when I noticed that my stringer, on which I had four or five catches, was moving. I pulled it up only to find a snake clinging to it, with almost half a fish in its wide jaws.

“Was it a water moccasin?” he asked.

“I really didn’t look that carefully,” I said. Actually, I was so terrified, I threw the whole thing as far away from me as I could.

“It was probably a harmless water snake of some kind,” he said.

“So water snakes can bite under water?”

“Right.”

“But water moccasins aren’t ‘water snakes’?”

He wasn’t sure about that. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure about any of it. “We don’t know much about snakes,” he said. “That’s the saddest thing about it.”

The point, of course, is that biological facts don’t mitigate. Regardless of whether or not a water moccasin or any other type of snake could perform such an action under water begs the question of whether or not such actual incidents that have provided the foundation for this story over and over for years and years ever took place. The answer, alas, is that there’s simply no way to know.

The only thing I’m sure of is that the tellers of the tales purely believe it. Again, psychology is outside my field, but it’s a fairly ordinary human trait to come to believe a story that one knows is false merely because years of repetition have made it a part of the fabric of actual experience. I suspect that if these taletellers were strapped down and subjected to a lie detector’s probes, they would be certified as truthful, even though they may have made the whole thing up or stolen it from someone and adapted it for personal use. In almost every case, the teller becomes defensive, even angry when he or she is challenged about it; often, the victim or at least the eyewitness to the horror is made into a relative or close friend, a protective shield that deflects penetrating questions about their own credibility.

###

This is not so odd a phenomenon. Many folk tales are based on the same sort of self-delusion. I know a long-haul trucker who swears that he picked up a hitchhiker one night, took him through a town, let him out on the highway. He noted that the young man had a peculiar birthmark on his cheek and that he walked with a pronounced limp. Then, later, on down the road, when the trucker stopped for coffee, he mentioned the incident and was informed that the young man he had given a ride to had been run over and killed the night before. Of course, the victim had a peculiar birthmark on his cheek and walked with a limp. And now, of course, he’s a doomed soul, destined to spend eternity hitching a ride on a lonely stretch of rural highway.

This story has been shared over coffee and veal cutlets from Trucker’s Heaven in the California desert to the Last Chance for American Cooking Truckstop on the New York Turnpike. Sometimes the birthmark is a scar or an eye-patch or some other discernable disfigurement; sometimes the limp is a hump, a bent neck, a withered arm, or twisted hand, or even a metal brace or prosthesis. Sometimes, it’s a girl, not a boy seeking the ride. But in all cases the hitchhiker is dead, killed in some tragic accident or as the result of some terrific crime. And in all cases, the rider is polite, even handsome or beautiful, except, of course, for a marring physical characteristic.

A curious reversal of the story involves a hitchhiker who is picked up by a trucker, given a ride to a roadside diner. When he comes inside, he discovers that the kindly teamster was driving a ghost-truck, that he had been killed in a horrible accident some time before. This version of the story was even the basis for a country song some decades ago.

Another story involves two teenagers who for obvious reasons are parked on a remote country lane, although it’s widely known that a convicted axe-murderer has escaped from a nearby prison. When they complete their business and are ready to leave (a storm is rising), the car won’t start. The girl panics and demands that the boy do something. Accordingly, the boy locks her in the car and slogs off into the wind, rain, and lightning to seek help. She, in the meantime, thinks she hears a muffled scream, then suddenly becomes aware through the noise of the storm of a scritch-scratching sound on the roof of the car. Remembering the news of the escaped convict, she recalls that his crime was to have beheaded a woman and hanged her body upside down from a tree limb on an isolated country road. As her terror mounts, she notices that the rain is washing blood down over the windshield of the car. Convinced that the mutilated corpse is dangling just overhead, she becomes hysterical, screaming herself into madness. When her boyfriend finally returns, he finds her in a catatonic state, her face frozen into a terrified expression, her eyes unable to close, her mind utterly gone. She remains in this condition forever. The authorities are mystified, for the only evidence that anything unusual happened was that the low-hanging branches of a sycamore tree blowing in the rainy gale had marred the roof of the car, and the tree’s corrosive sap had dripped down to stain the car’s finish.

I first heard this tale about the same time I heard about the snakes in the river. The teller was an older kid in our neighborhood, one who had a driver’s license and was also chockfull of sexual escapades (that were no less fantastic, in every sense of the word) with numerous girls of our mutual acquaintance. The boy in question was his cousin; the girl his older brother’s ex-steady. I don’t recall asking him how, exactly, his cousin learned what it was that drove the girl to madness—as “she never spoke another word” was the story’s conclusion.

I’ve heard the story five or six times over the course of the years. The particulars vary only slightly, and the unsupported conclusions remain unexplained. My son actually brought it home from a baseball camp he attended when he was in junior high. When I asked him how anyone knew what it was that so scared the abandoned girl and then rendered her permanently incommunicado, he scoffed, “Dad. That’s not the point.”

###

There are probably thousands of these folk tales around. I have been witness to the birth of one of them. In the retelling, the scene is a Little League Ball park in or near a metropolitan area; the setting is almost always “about five years ago,” give or take. In actuality, the event took place in Denton, Texas. The situation was that the umpires allowed a game to continue after lightning was seen overhead. Sure enough, a bolt struck the field, and a player was—well, actually, nothing happened to anyone. There was a game, however, and a storm. The umpires didn’t order the field vacated until the last moment, and lightning did strike nearby. But all the players were safely under an awning next to the concession stand, and in an hour’s time, play resumed.

The first retelling of this tale came to my notice only a few years after it happened. The teller was an umpire, who related it while eyeing a suspicious-looking cloud on the distant horizon while he explained why he was calling that evening’s game. In his version, he was working the game in question, and he was the only umpire voting for an early suspension. He told the coaches, players, and parents gathered around him that when the lightning struck, a boy was killed. “And I won’t let that happen again,” he solemnly intoned; then he called off the contest.

I later learned that the Cowboys were playing on television that night, and he really didn’t want to miss the kickoff.

I next heard the story a few seasons later. In this rendition, six boys were “killed or seriously injured,” the taletelling coach assured me. “My nephew was there,” he said, “but he had sense enough to get off the field.”

Over the years, I’ve heard that story dozens of times around ballparks from Nacogdoches to Stillwater, Oklahoma. The field moves around—Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Austin, even El Paso—and the number of victims—dead or seriously injured—varies from a single unfortunate all the way up to a whole team. More recently, I’ve heard versions of it adapted for softball, soccer, and one notable equestrian event in which one of the dead was a prize thoroughbred.

In the fall of 1995, lightning did actually strike a football field in a Dallas suburb during an afternoon workout. A youngster was tragically killed, and several more were, indeed, seriously injured. Incredibly, the television reporter covering the story related the baseball field incident, placed it (not surprisingly for a Dallas station reporter) in Houston, and calculated eight deaths as a result of officials’ negligence. The implication, of course, was that the coach, in this case, had been careless of commonsense safety, although witnesses testified that there was no cloud, no storm visibly approaching and that the lightning came “from a clear blue sky.” So, alas, did this tale of tragic woe.

With constantly renewing vigor, this story of athletics and thunderbolts has been woven into the fabric of modern cultural argot along with rivers full of snakes, hapless lovers on lonely lanes, and ghostly truckers and hitchhikers. The tellers relate them as truth, verify them as something they or people they know and unerringly trust have witnessed. Once they are retold, the stories become a part of the personal memory of the tellers’ pasts, as true as any story anyone might relate about his or her past, for they possess the quality of illogic and incredibility, two elements that often are the primary markers between fiction and nonfiction. To put it tritely, the truth is always stranger than fiction, and any story presented as “true” takes on a weight it would not otherwise have. These stories probably start out as entertaining anecdotes designed to titillate, frighten, or amaze, but they end as part of actual personal experience, something to contribute to a conversational roundtable that will steal the show, hold the floor, and give people something profound to think about. But as my son perceived, the point is that the tale—although initially conceived as a fabrication—is true. It’s just not factual. But it probably has a moral, or it did when it was originated: don’t go into strange water without looking first; don’t pick up mysterious hitchhikers or accept rides from strangers; don’t play ball in the rain; and don’t go for a slap and tickle on desolate country by-ways, at least not on by-ways near a prison from which dangerous murderers are apt to escape. The teller creates no harm in retelling it, even with individualized embellishments; and, in most cases, they’re good stories, fun to listen to, easy to remember and adopt as our own. If they’re obscure enough, they can even be adapted into award-winning fiction.

###

I have no way of knowing if Larry McMurtry ever heard the story about water moccasins in the Canadian River before he wrote it into his novel. Perhaps one of his cowboy relatives or acquaintances told the tale to him at some point in his youth; perhaps he read it in a book of such yarns. Or perhaps he never heard it before and made it up entirely from whole cloth. It’s a nice piece, and it fits well into the fictional fabric of Lonesome Dove; it was also memorably dramatic in the television version of the novel.

But at the least, I maintain that even if it did happen to some luckless cowpuncher, or to some fisherman, hunter, youthful skinny-dipper, or soldier in a foreign land, it didn’t happen but once—well, maybe twice—but certainly not as often as it’s been claimed in the retelling of it. If it did, no river or lake in America—maybe in the world—would be safe to enter. At the same time, though, maybe it would be safer than contradicting some taleteller who will swear on a six-pack of quality brew that the incident truly did happen, and that he saw it with his own eyes. Who knows, maybe he did.

MY FIRST DATE

“The absence of romance in my history will,

I fear, detract somewhat from its interest. “

—Thucydides

Dating in my hometown when I was a kid was not easily done if for no other reason than there simply wasn’t much to do. The movie had burned down when I was in junior high, and the bowling alley went up less than a year later. Occasionally there was a dance held at the Teen Canteen, but ticket prices were high, and the chaperones usually outnumbered the couples on the dance floor two-to-one. There was a drive-in movie, but asking a girl out to a drive-in was, in those days at least, like making an obscene proposition. Besides, it was only open between June and September. So dating, for the most part, was restricted to driving around and around the town’s main streets, “The Drag,” with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke, and to attending special, school-sponsored events such as banquets and dances.

Not surprisingly, most kids in my hometown didn’t date very much at all. There were the “steady” couples who logged hour after hour during the early weeks of their courtships, driving around and around the town with an occasional stop at the Dairy Queen for a Lime Coke. But when their romance had progressed beyond the public display stage, they retired to “The Lanes,” where they would park for hour after hour of love-locked embraces, pausing only for an occasional tour of “The Drag” so their parents wouldn’t get wind of their teens’ torrid trysts on rural byways.

But that was for the “steadies.” The rest of us mostly hung around the Dairy Queen parking lot after we had used up all of somebody’s gas, waiting on the “steadies” to take their dates home and come by with wild, pornographic tales of the escapades—or for midnight, whichever came first.

Frequently, however, an event would occur which would require even the most reluctant among us to seek a female escort for the evening. Events such as the Senior Banquet, the Sports Banquet, the Band Banquet, the Future Farmers’ Banquet, the Future Homemakers’ Banquet, the Future Teachers’ Banquet, and all kinds of other “feeds” would force even the farm or ranch boy to trade in boots for a pair of dress shoes and a starched shirt for an evening of preordained misery in the company of some “young lady” to whom he wouldn’t have spoken three words otherwise and probably wouldn’t say more than five anyway.

I personally participated in a number of these events during the four years I spent in high school, and I soon evolved a theory about teenaged dating in a small town. It stems from all those years of sitting beside some “young lady” and eating cold creamed-chicken and cherry cobbler and listening to some bore drone on about the marvelous wonders of whatever organization was sponsoring the affair: There is no way for an individual to have a good time on a date.

The odds are totally against it. In the first place, no small-town boy is going to ask out any small-town girl he knows well. The only reason why he would know her well is because he sees her every day—in class or some other activity. To be turned down by a person whom one might encounter on a daily basis thereafter would be intolerably embarrassing. In the second place, no normal “young man” is going to ask out any “young lady” who will fail to provide him with the proper social status he thinks he deserves. As a result, he usually finds some girl who is, in his eyes anyway, ravishingly beautiful, markedly intelligent, and who represents almost everything he does not through her personal interests and activities.

Thus, two total strangers frequently embark on an evening which is designed by him to be interesting for her; but because he has probably totally misjudged her, the event will turn out to be boring, confusing, strained. Then, after spending most of his time worrying about whether she will enjoy it and whether she is enjoying it, he devotes countless hours to worrying about whether she has enjoyed it sufficiently to go out with him again, knowing in his heart of hearts that she wouldn’t if her life depended on it.

But in spite of all this anguish and worry, the dating ritual continues throughout adolescence and young adulthood; the particulars change, but the pain marches on. Indeed, it spans generations. The practice is firmly established at an early age. Parents expect it, friends encourage it, society demands it. In a small town, it is particularly important, for without it, one imagines when he discovers girls and a daily growth of whiskers at about the same time, he could wind up being one of those “old bachelors” his mother shakes her head over whenever one of their names is mentioned. There are only so many years to master the craft, and it’s important to establish experience so one can point to a track record and assert himself as a social if not a masculine animal.

My experience was no different. Years later I would find myself still uncertain and insecure over the same problems that beset me when I was fourteen and, as yet, dateless. But every time I looked over at my female companion of the moment, I realized that the pattern for disaster was cut long ago, in a small almost anonymous town where I experienced my first date.

###

I was like most boys at “almost fifteen.” My most prized possessions were my Learner’s Driving Permit and my limited access to my old man’s 1953 Chevy. As most of my older classmates had done, I had been driving with friends providing the licensed driver in the front seat for almost a year; and while I had logged my share of miles around “The Drag,” talking with my buddies about cars, school, music, college, and, of course, girls, I had not yet found the courage or the motivation to venture onto the highway of society with a “young lady.”

I had maintained a secret crush on a girl named Sherry French for over six years, all the way back to first grade, and as soon as I received my real driving license, I told myself, I would have no hesitation about calling her up and asking her to be my first date.

Unfortunately, a friend of mine, Allen Jenks, who had been driving for almost a year with a real license, had taken advantage of his early start as a motorist by establishing a dating relationship with my intended. This bothered me somewhat, but I took comfort in the fact that his only access to a car was his one-sixth share in a 1958 Rambler—Jenks also had five older brothers of dating and driving age, and a weekend claim on the auto was a rare premium. As a result, he used my car to meet Sherry on “The Drag,” with my ever-present self behind the wheel. Also, I was sure his general clodishness would be no match for the savoir faire I knew I would exude upon receipt of my real driving license.

But suddenly, in the spring of my freshman year in high school, things advanced at a more rapid rate than I had anticipated. The annual Spring Dance was upcoming. Normally, I attended such affairs “stag,” usually in the company of a whole gang of friends, including Jenks and some other proud but dateless guys, and I had no reason to think that this time would be an exception. Jenks, however, announced that he was going to figure out which of his brothers had “dibs” on the Rambler that evening and ask Sherry to double date.

Now my whole social life didn’t depend solely on one friend, and even if it had, Jenks would not have been the one to set any patterns for me. But later the same day, I ran into my best friend, Matt Holcomb, who tilted the scales in a fatal balance.

Every boy in a small town grows up with a “Best Friend,” and Holcomb was mine. I don’t suppose we did much of anything in our entire lives without discussing it with each other. Naturally, we each felt superior to the other in various and different ways, and I suppose it would be fair to say that our friendship was based as much on competitive squabbling as anything else. But I was sure we knew each other very well. So it came as a tremendous shock when he suggested that we get dates and double in my old man’s car.

Holcomb had, like Jenks, been a licensed driver for quite a while, but his parents had better sense than to allow him out on “The Drag” in their car, so he logged his hours on the streets behind someone else’s wheel, usually mine. Once he broached the subject of getting dates for the dance, childhood taboos about seriously discussing girls vanished. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out, ostensibly for each other, who would be best to ask.

Second to finding something original to do, the major problem about dating in a small town is the limited number of “young ladies” a “young man” could choose from. As a freshman, my choices were even more severely limited. In the first place, there were only about thirty girls in the whole class—upperclassmen were already dating about half of those. Junior high girls were absolutely out of range, and to invite an older girl was to invite ridicule from my peers if not a black eye from some junior or senior. A few more were “undatable” owing to physical deformities or socioeconomic family situations that would have—I’m now ashamed to say—scandalized my parents and robbed me of whatever prestige the date was supposed to provide in the first place. Of the remaining fifteen, five were in all my classes, and the potential discomfort of having to go eventually without a date and face those who turned me down was more than I could stand. Of the ten remaining, five were Church of Christ and did not dance; two were Baptist, and their parents would not let them dance; and one was a Jehovah’s Witness and couldn’t go out on a Saturday, even if anyone asked her. That left two; and one of those was Linda Cunningham, whose family was so rich that none of my crowd dared even speak to her, let alone consider offering to chauffeur her to something as mundane as a Spring Dance in something as common as a ’53 Chevy.

The process of elimination had taken several hours; there had been much teasing, guffawing, and whispered lewd suggestion, but when we finally got down to the magic one—the only one remaining—only silence prevailed between Holcomb and me. We were both thinking the same name at the same time: Caroline Hauffman.

Caroline was blonde, Nordic blonde—blue-eyed, Nordic blue-eyed—quiet and shy. My old man, according to family legend, had dated her mother, Elizabeth, when they were in high school; and on several occasions I had heard him pronounce whenever Caroline’s mother’s name was mentioned, “Beautiful woman, but no personality.”

I didn’t know what he meant, exactly, but I did know that Caroline was as timid a creature as I had ever known. She had her mother’s looks and would, therefore, be a prestige date; best yet, no upperclassman had shown an interest in her at all. In fact, so far as I knew, she had never had a date. As we talked around her name and shifted our eyes and attention to my collection of model movie monsters, I mentally measured Caroline’s assets and liabilities and came up with the most important argument in her favor, the one thing that made her a perfect selection for a date: I hardly knew her.

She was in none of my classes, went to the Methodist Church, and we had no special friends in common. I held my breath and prayed that Holcomb would leave quickly without announcing any deliberate intentions of his own.

Some prepubescent taboos were still in force, however. He made some excuses about errands for his mother and exited in his usual strolling gait, walking down to the corner where, with a quick glance over his shoulder, he broke into a dead run for the remaining two blocks to his house, his telephone, and a date with Caroline.

But it was only ten paces to my own telephone. And within minutes, without thinking at all about the momentous nature of the event, I was calmly asking Caroline Hauffman to go with me to the Spring Dance.

I suppose I should have indelibly etched on my mind the exact content of that conversation, but all I remember is that it seemed remarkably easy, even casual, the way I asked and she accepted, not unlike my asking Holcomb or Jenks to join me for a basketball game. The whole process was almost boring. I do remember wondering afterwards if there was something I should have said or asked or let her ask, but there didn’t seem to be, so I hung up and pranced around my room feeling rather pleased with myself.

Suddenly, a devilish thought struck me: I called Holcomb’s number and found it busy; then I quickly dialed Caroline’s number again and discovered that my suspicions were true—I had beaten him to it! Now he was going to have to pick between the grossly fat Florence Belcher and Delores Buckman, who had a set of front teeth to match her name. Within an hour he called me, stating that since there obviously weren’t two datable girls available for the dance, why didn’t we simply go stag as always and double date another time. In the ensuing argument, I recall only the names for each other we invented, and that we didn’t plan to speak to one another for at least twenty years.

Of course, Holcomb’s bowing out presented a problem about transportation. But since I had been using the Chevy on my own quite a bit of late, I was confident my old man would make an exception: just to Caroline’s house, out to the Country Club, and back home, just for the one evening. Unfortunately, my self-confidence got the better of me. Prefatory to asking him for permission to drive alone for the big evening, I began running errands for my mother “solo,” proving that I could be trusted without a licensed driver in the seat beside me.

I had never understood that requirement, anyway. The theory seems to be that a “learner” would be less likely to plow head-on into a brick wall if someone was in the seat beside him who knew something that the learner supposedly did not. How this miracle of prevention was supposed to come about, I wasn’t too sure, but I demonstrated the wisdom of the requirement on Sunday afternoon—not by plowing head-on into a brick wall, but into the side of our garage.

The result was less damage to the car or the wall than to my pride and to my expectations when my mother announced that I would not be permitted to drive at all until my regular license came through. Cruel as this may have been, it was refined from my old man’s original sentence, which was to have my right leg amputated at the knee.

It took me almost the whole evening to work up the courage to tell my parents about my date. They were never particularly sensitive to adolescent needs, and while they surprised me by not being in a mood to tease, they disappointed me by not being in a mood to understand either.

“Your father can pick you up and bring you home,” my mother chirped as she prepared roast beef leftovers. “What time will the dance be over?”

The opening she left almost escaped me in the overwhelming panic I was experiencing as I envisioned my old man, in clear view of my friends, carting me and my date to and fro like some junior high kid, but I quickly recovered and answered, “Oh, midnight . . . after midnight!”

Now my old man was a lot of things, but one thing he was not was a night owl. He went to bed every night at 10:00 p.m., sharp. The problem with my mother’s suggestion was immediately apparent to both of us, but she only said, “We’ll see,” which in motherese means, “You still can’t drive the car, but perhaps something can be worked out.”

I knew my next move: I went immediately to the phone and called Jenks, who was still working on the Rambler’s reservation schedule. He and Sherry, Caroline and I would double date. When I approached my old man with my “reasonable compromise”—Jenks, not I, would drive the Chevy—he just nodded and asked who my date was.

My reply elicited exactly the response I expected, “Beautiful girl, but just like her mother, no personality.”

###

The next week progressed through a flurry of anticipation and preparation that rivaled plans for a military operation. On Monday, Jenks and I tuned and worked over the Chevy’s engine so she would be running just right. On Tuesday, I bought a new suit, complete with new shirt, tie, socks, and underwear. Jenks and I added “falsies” to the Chevy’s wheel rims to give her that “whitewall look.”

On Wednesday, Caroline found me in study hall and asked me what color my suit would be. I was so delighted that she knew I had bought one, I could only mutter “blue” and stare at her in wondrous silence. On Thursday, Jenks and I put seat covers on the Chevy, and I managed to mention my upcoming date to all my dateless buddies who would form the ever-present “stag line.”

Friday found me at the barbershop for a flat-top haircut and at the drugstore where I bought a bottle of English Leather cologne and a new razor. And on Saturday, at 4:00, three-and-one-half hours before the big event, Jenks and I placed on the Chevy the piéce de résistance: a chrome suicide knob. We were set.

I laid out my new duds on the bed, careful not to wrinkle any crease or dirty any lapel, and went in to supper. My mother, of course, served what she always served on Saturday nights: liver and onions. I didn’t eat much, which caused my mother to smile a lot and my old man to grumble. As she cleared the table for dessert, she asked, “Did you all have that little talk yet?” My old man grumbled even louder, “Right after dinner,” and he motioned me to follow him.

All week long he had been taking me aside for “little talks” that never got anywhere. Tuesday, after I bought my suit, he drove me out to the stockyards where we spent the better part of an hour watching a bull and several heifers look bored and hot in the afternoon sun. He chain-smoked Luckys for a while and finally said, “Oh, hell. Let’s go.” That, plus some even more inconsequential attempts at sex education, was the extent of my parents’ direct approach to the subject. Some months later they gave me a book.

He abruptly ordered me to follow him outside, where we stood rocking on our heels in the twilight while he lit up another Lucky. He suddenly thrust the pack out toward me. I remembered all his stern admonitions about my even considering the habit, but after an awkward, silent moment, I selected a single paper cylinder and set it unprofessionally on my lip. He grumbled as he snapped open his Zippo and lit it, obviously embarrassed as much by his foolishness in offering me a smoke as by my foolishness in accepting it. All at once, he reached into his pocket and produced a $10.00 bill. “In case you need it,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say, and the smoke was making me dizzy, but abruptly he snatched it away from my mouth and ushered me back inside with a nod to my mother who returned a confident and knowing smile and picked up her ongoing lecture on gentlemanly behavior.

At some point—Wednesday, I think—I realized two things: First of all, I was about to attend a dance where I was going to have to dance. In spite of her Baptist-born reservations, my mother had made my twelfth summer intolerable by enrolling me in Miss Billie Rae Wilson’s School of Dance. I recall with a convulsive shudder the shame and terror of those four weeks: slinking down alleyways, making up elaborate lies to my friends about where I was, threatening my kid brother with his life if he breathed a word, and, the worst of it: spending all those hot, sticky nights in Miss Billie Rae’s un-air-conditioned studio, hugging her overweight and overly fragrant waist to my chest.

At the end of the class, all of Miss Billie Rae’s students had to perform in a recital. My mother, secure in the knowledge that my social potential was insured, was doubtlessly pleased with my performance, even if I did risk my immortal soul by the very activity of moving in rhythm to music in the arms of a girl.

But what my mother never could understand was that the fox trot, the waltz, the tango and cha-cha-cha were not the kinds of dancing that teenagers did. As a result, except for the two weeks I spent at Miss Billie Rae’s, I had never set foot on a dance floor. In fact, I had sworn never to do so.

But now I was going to a dance. With a date. Things change.

I tried to minimize the problem. It wouldn’t minimize. I spent some time watching American Bandstand, but that didn’t help much. The camera wouldn’t focus on one couple long enough for me to learn all the intricate movements of the older bop and the newer twist. And these were all city kids who already knew the basics and kept putting in extra steps and movements that looked professional. I borrowed some records from Jenks and tried to practice in my room, but my kid brother kept showing up and laughing himself silly.

I would just have to tell Caroline that I sprained my ankle or something. There was no way on earth that I could dance, not in front of all those guys on the “stag line” who would be doing what we always did on the “stag line”: making fun of anyone we knew who was trying to dance.

The second thing I realized was that I really didn’t want to spend an evening with Caroline. She was nice enough, and she was better looking than almost any other girl. But I didn’t want any other girl—I wanted Sherry, and Sherry was going to be with Jenks. The knowledge that I would have to spend the whole date in Sherry’s company but not with her began to eat at me. There had been moments of ego inflation—when Caroline asked about my suit, for example—but basically the image of Caroline paled when held up to Sherry, a girl I had held in secret special affection for years.

Still, I was determined to put as good a face on the whole thing as I could muster. I took a long, long shower, shaved especially close—cutting myself only three times—and carefully donned my new clothes. By the time I was dressed I had come up to a peak level of excitement. I was almost breathless.

My old man, squatting in front of the TV, fooling as he always did with the mysteries of the fine-tuning knob, tossed me the Chevy’s keys as I passed by. He didn’t even look up. “What color socks you got on?” he asked.

“Black,” I replied, checking to make sure.

“Be sure you never wear white socks with a suit,” he ordered as if he didn’t hear me. “Anytime you put on a suit of clothes, put on black socks.” That one piece of wisdom has meant more to me over the years than all the father-and-son talks we might have had.

My mother met me at the door and positively beamed as she removed the toilet paper from my shaving cuts. Embarrassed, I tried to push past her, but she stopped me cold with a question, “Where’s your corsage?”

Corsage!? I had forgotten about it completely. That was why Caroline asked about the color of my suit. It was a hint for me to find out the color of her dress so I could match it with a flower. How could I have been so stupid?

“Here,” she said, producing a blue and pink box. “Mothers are good for something.” I think that had she asked me to lie down and die right there, I would have. Instead I only muttered that I didn’t know what Caroline was wearing.

“It’s all right,” she smiled through what I later realized were tears. “I called Elizabeth this morning.”

“Elizabeth!” My old man growled from in front of the TV. “Beautiful woman, but no—” The rest was lost behind the door as I left for the date. My first.

###

I would like to report fantastic details about this momentous evening for which I had planned so long and carefully. Alas, the whole affair was remarkably uneventful. My old regrets about being with Caroline rather than Sherry evaporated when Caroline appeared wearing a sleek, black velvet dress topped off with a real diamond tiara in her golden hair. It wasn’t that Sherry ceased to attract me: that unrequited love would continue unabated for the next three years, undaunted by all kinds of adversity. It was only that for the first time I was proud of being with a person who was apparently pleased to be with me; this provided my ego and unflagging sense of romance with a boost.

I recall that I did most of the talking that evening. Jenks said very little since he and Sherry had a fight over his “honking her out” instead of coming to the door. Sherry tried to talk to Caroline, but Caroline said very little to Sherry or to anyone else. I finally realized what my old man had meant about her having “no personality.” It wasn’t that she was dumb, uncomfortable, or nervous—she just never could think of anything to say. In later years, her dates would arrive at the Dairy Queen parking lot to complain that she hadn’t said two words all evening. She later went to graduate school and became a research chemist. Perhaps she found the solitude and silence of the laboratory more her style.

There were some uncomfortable moments at the dance. It was too hot for one thing, and my new shirt wilted immediately. I managed to dance quite a few of the dances, but my new shoes hurt, and I drank enough of the sickly sweet, too warm punch to make me slightly ill. I recall looking more than once over toward the “stag line” and feeling proud and superior to Holcomb and the rest of the guys, but I also remember wondering if they envied me half as much as I did them.

Caroline and I took a couple of walks out by the pool, but she maintained her silence, and I did all the talking. She was so beautiful, I tried to feel confident, to convince myself that things were really going very well. There was a full moon and music and a warm spring night. If only she would say something.

When we left the dance, we made the requisite five or six passes around “The Drag” and drank a couple of Lime Cokes, but Caroline ordered a plain Coke, which was more evidence of my old man’s theory’s validity. And she remained mute, speaking only when spoken to, answering questions in polite monosyllables. I was so frustrated and miserable that I wanted to cry.

After a while, Jenks drove out to “The Lanes” and parked. Had I been able to protest this particular side trip I would have, for I knew that Caroline was not of an inclination to spend any amorous moments with me on that evening or, for that matter, any other. If she wouldn’t talk to me, I reasoned, she sure wasn’t going to “make out” with me, full moon or no.

This was all my fault, of course, not Jenks’s. All week we had planned, “if things went okay,” to make a stop on “The Lanes.” But I had never really believed that Caroline was going to go along with it. Still, I wasn’t about to admit to Jenks that I was unwilling to try, or that I was going to eliminate the possibility days before I had to.

I suppose I had two plans: If the “slow dances” were of sufficient number and Caroline and I managed to spark the right amount of “flame” in each other, then a session under the full moon might be right in order. Actually, I didn’t expect that any such “flame” would ignite at all. However, I was anxious enough to explore the mysteries of “The Lanes” to carry out the plan if circumstances unexpectedly developed along those lines.

Unfortunately, my sweaty shirt, aching feet, and slight nausea from the punch cancelled any romantic notions I might have conjured; so I should have gone to Plan B, which was simply to tell Jenks to keep driving around and around “The Drag” until time to take the girls home. But I completely forgot about it until he swing the Chevy onto Airport Road, and it was too late to say anything without implying to him, and especially to Sherry, that I was some kind of prude or suggesting to the ever-silent Caroline that I was reluctant to spend any amount of time embracing, kissing, or whatever else was expected of a parked couple on “The Lanes.”

But there we were, and I felt totally helpless as to what my next move should be.

I had run out of witty conversation on the second round of Lime Cokes, and Jenks and Sherry were in no mood to carry on a rousing repartée: They had some making up to do and went at it hammer and tong for three-quarters of an hour. Through it all, Caroline and I squatted in the Chevy’s back seat in silence, since the radio only worked when the engine was running. She sat there, prim, proper, and silently beautiful, her hands folded neatly in her lap; I sat there, stiff, clumsy, and unbearably nervous, wondering if I should move closer to her or attempt to hold hands or try to put an arm around her, and whether I could do any of those things without her screaming.

Our mute meditation continued, however, punctuated only by my feeble attempts at conversation which died in my throat and by the slurping noises and heavy breathing coming from the front seat. Caroline only stared straight ahead as if some fascinating message was printed on the seat covers in front of her. She was simply waiting, politely, patiently, waiting.

Finally, I mentioned that it was getting late, and Jenks—thank God—took the hint. We soon delivered Sherry and Caroline to their respective homes, but not without a mini-reprise of the torrid scenes we had just witnessed, passionately played out in Sherry’s driveway. Caroline and I bade each other goodnight with assurances that we had both had a “real good time,” and with promises of “doing it again sometime, real soon,” knowing all the time that we never would.

I had held forth hopes of a goodnight kiss, more for Jenks’s watchful eye than my amorous expectations. Although I figured the parking episode had diminished any spark of ardor that might otherwise have developed, I still thought that something in the way of a semi-affectionate bussing might be tolerated. So we waited on her porch, facing each other in the brilliance of the porch light bulb, both wondering what should happen next.

She stood, staring at me, trying to decide, no doubt, what I might try to do, and what she should do when I tried it. I stood, staring at her, trying to decide what she might do if I should try anything, and what, if anything, I should try. I began to lean forward, watching carefully for the invitation of the slightest tilt of her chin upward toward my approaching face. But she didn’t move: Not an inch. Not a half-inch. My courage flagged, and I straightened up just as I thought I might have perceived the receptive tilt, but it was too late.

“Well,” I said, “See ya ’round.” And I galloped toward the Chevy and Jenks’s questioning look, which I had already planned to answer if it ever became words with the explanation that Caroline told me she thought she was coming down with mono.

Thus the event for which such complex plans were made, for which I had waited all my postpubescent life, ended on an ignominious note: a scurrying retreat from a girl who was probably just as uncertain as I about what to do next.

We made our obligatory trip by the Dairy Queen, but most everyone had already gone home. Holcomb though, was there, and he thwarted any expectations I had about gloating, by producing a pair of empty wine bottles and a tale of girls from Childress who had driven up and found him and some pals right after they left the dance. The next weekend, they all had dates with these mysterious girls for their own dance, which would have a live band and the promise of illicit wine and beer for anyone who was brave enough to sample it.

They had been making “The Drag,” drinking wine and planning their party the whole time I was watching Jenks and Sherry set new records for holding kisses, and now they were full of expectations for a sinful adventure beyond imagination. No one, especially not Holcomb, wanted to hear about my first date. The lies I was prepared to tell never left my lips.

###

After Holcomb and the rest drifted off, I took Jenks home and bravely violated my old man’s embargo on my driving and steered the Chevy to my house solo. I pulled into the drive and got out and was surprised to see a figure standing in the shadows by the front porch. I knew who it was from the glow of his cigarette.

“Have a good time?” he asked as I came up the walk, hoping he hadn’t noticed that I brought the car home alone. I nodded, walked into the darkness near him. He was still dressed, hadn’t been to bed. I don’t think I’d ever seen him up and awake this late when there wasn’t a tornado alert or someone sick in the family. “You get that little girl home okay?”

I nodded again, realized it was too dark to see me. “Yeah,” I said. “Uh, yessir.”

He offered me a cigarette, again. This time I shook my head. He nodded. “You treat a girl with respect,” he said. “You don’t talk about her to nobody. You don’t do or say anything you can’t look her in the eye about the next morning.” I nodded. “Doesn’t matter if you like her or not. Doesn’t matter if she likes you or not. Doesn’t mean a thing. Treat her with respect. Show some gumption.”

For a moment I stood not knowing what to say. My feet hurt. I was embarrassed. I finally said, “It was fun.”

He nodded, crushed out his cigarette. “It’ll get better. Easier, anyway.” He coughed, though he didn’t need to. “Tomorrow I want that garage cleaned out. Hear me?”

“Yessir.”

We started up the steps. He opened the screen door, then stopped, and in the sudden yellow glow of the porch light, I saw something distant cross his eyes. “Going to take her out again?”

“Uh, I . . . I don’t know.”

He nodded, squeezed my shoulder a little too hard. “Just like her mother,” he said. “Beautiful girl, but no personality.”

LITERARY WORTH:

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO ARBITRATION

“None but a blockhead ever wrote but for money.”

—Samuel Johnson

As an academic trained in the study and appreciation of literature, I’ve spent the better part of my life staunchly defending the ramparts of literary endeavor against the slings and arrows of outrageous pop fiction lovers. I have steadily despaired of those who read Stephen King, Terry C. Johnston, Mary Higgins Clark, Danielle Steele, J.K. Rowling, and their ilk. I said stuff like, “If you want a good ghost story, go read Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” Edgar Allen Poe can’t be beat for a good thriller. A great western is The Last of the Mohicans. You want a sea yarn, try The Odyssey.” Then I’d wait until my companion was out of earshot, switch my radio from NPR to my favorite C&W station, drive home, draw the shades, and curl up with a good Dean Koontze, Robert B. Parker, or Elmore Leonard novel. And I’d tell no one about it, for I was terrified that someone might learn that in my heart of hearts I preferred trash to treasure. After all, as a college professor, I was supposed to be an arbiter of great literature, not an enthusiastic fan of the “easy read.”

It took me a long time to come to terms with this, to understand that the problem I had lay in the egocentricity of the academic elitism in which I had been trained. Like most of my colleagues, I wanted to be an arbiter of literary worth, but I refused to admit to reading anything that didn’t have some sort of official stamp of canonical approval on it. I carried this attitude into my choice of other literary entertainments as well: plays, film, even television programming. By doing so, I was imitating my academic mentors, trying to fit my taste and sensibilities to those whose opinions I respected, whose aesthetic measuring sticks were hewn out of some solid scholarly notion of what is art, what isn’t. I aspired to be like them, and I desperately wanted to reach a point where I could eschew popular fiction and look down on it with the same conviction that draws a derisive sneer whenever I’m confronted with the latest television sitcom.

After all, I never watch commercial television. I only tune into PBS or maybe the National Geographic Channel. Right.

I think, though, that I—and they—were missing the point. If we were sincere, we were also missing a lot of good reading and viewing. And as a professional writer, I finally began to realize and embrace an alternative point of view.

You see, it’s not whether something is deemed to be literature or not that matters; it’s the question of the value of the canon (there’s that word, again) that is at stake. But that value rests more in the breadth of individual erudition, not in the depth. I do believe that the reason people can read and appreciate something that is popular, even the latest celebrity “as told to” autobiography and determine its worth or lack thereof is because they have read widely in the established literary tradition. They have experience with those works that have withstood the vestiges of time and survived intact, those that still speak to us today through their wisdom, beauty, and eloquence. These are the more genuine standards by which anything new has to be measured. As educated readers, we have no other reliable source of arbitration.

But it’s important to realize that much popular writing is written by men and women who are themselves as well read as any stuffy academic. These writers are as sensitive to what creative writing professors are wont to call “the elements of fiction”: character development, solid plot line, credible dialogue, and highly detailed settings as are any of the literary giants of the canon. Indeed, it is in their adaptation of these admittedly amorphous principles of fiction composition that their success as writers is established and sustained. That they may not do this as well as some recognized literary writers does not deny their accomplishments, although it may well diminish them; as T.S. Eliot and others have reminded us, all art depends on the established traditions of the individual talents of the past; or, to put it colloquially, when fiction is concerned, there’s precious little “new under the sun.”

Even so, Eliot was not saying—nor am I—that everything written has to be imitative or slavishly apish of the past. It is rather to say that those who decide whether or not a contemporary form has artistic merit should be measuring it against a standard of quality that a huge number of people over a large amount of time have established by their patronage if nothing else. But it’s vitally important that readers be well read in the works that established that standard; otherwise, to put it in pure business terms, they’re trying to assess the worth of something without knowing the perimeters of the market.

This is where the dilution of the canon in the name of political correctness hurts. Dredging up works that have not sustained a readership over a period of time and touting them merely because of the identity of a writer effects an erosion of the standard. It suggests that lesser works are valuable because who wrote them was this or that sort of person, not because of the works’ innate quality or originality. What’s ignored is their staying power, their capacity to excite and amaze multiple generations of readers over long periods of time.

Now I agree that research applied to finding previously ignored writers of the past and adding them to the greater body of Western Literature—heretofore, mostly a collection of Old Dead White Guys—is a worthy enterprise, so long as the critical standard applied to such works is the same as would be applied to works that have already been canonized. Again, breadth is more important than depth. The problem is that some of the sudden replacements one finds in anthologies for the works of many of these ODWGs are sometimes not as good by a long shot as the stuff that was taken out to make room for them. Sometimes, they’re considerably inferior, often embarrassingly imitative, derivative, or just plain “bad.”

Of course, one might argue that—traditional standards be damned—deciding what is “good” and what isn’t is a subjective process, often colored by the evaluators’ personal priorities. But I would respond that if a reader decides something is ipso facto “bad” merely because it appeals to a great many less-than-well-educated people, then hasn’t he applied the same sort of prejudice that may well have excluded some writers from the canon all along? Actually, when literary history is examined, isn’t this the same sort of prejudice that has kept the novel from achieving literary respect for nearly two hundred years?

At the same time such novelists as Trollope and Thackery and certainly Charles Dickens were penning their fiction with a close eye on what the public wanted to read, numerous intellectuals and prominent individuals, including several American presidents, proudly proclaimed that they had never read a novel and had no intention of doing so. In this time, the novel was rarely if ever taught as a literary form in universities, and the works of such writers as Balzac and Flaubert, Sterne and Fielding were kept hidden in public libraries, reserved only for those indiscreet enough to ask for them. But in the midst of such fine distinctions between literature and popular reading, the public—the popular reading public—was calling for more of the kind of thing that gratified their sensibilities and satisfied their reading appetites. This, I believe, is what led to the elevation of the novel to literary form by such writers as Henry James, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, as well as many others; it is fundamental to the cause that William Dean Howells championed from “The Editor’s Chair” for years. But it’s important to remember that at the same time Howells was promoting the popular novel, Henry James was castigating many of his American contemporaries (particularly Samuel Clemens) who pandered to lower standards, baser tastes. James wanted literary quality to be the arbiter of literary art; Howells understood there were other important appeals required to sustain a readership.

But demand for literary quality is by no means ignored, even by the most common denominator of audiences. Today, when people attend a popular film or play, I think they are seeking the same quality they might find in bona fide literary reading, more or less. It may be that they’re merely seeking pure entertainment or escape, but there is ample literary effort geared in that vein, too. Much of Shakespeare is frivolous and escapist, just as is much of today’s writing. And he wasn’t afraid of the Elizabethan equivalents of blood-and-guts violence, gratuitous sex, and slapstick silliness. He also wasn’t writing exclusively for Oxford dons and delicate intellectual sensibilities and monitors of political correctness and moral certitude. By and large, he was writing for unwashed and unlettered “groundlings” who paid a penny apiece to be entertained. And he was writing for a queen who had a remarkable sensitivity to good humor and sentimental love stories.

That Shakespeare did what he did better than most substantiates his works’ survival over four centuries, but he wasn’t the only person of his time writing good stuff. Still, few of us would plunk down Broadway prices to see a revival of Ralph Roister Doister or The Dutch Courtesan, although they’re both extremely funny, well-written plays. And consider this: if Shakespeare’s entire reputation stood entirely on Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens or Two Gentlemen of Verona, he probably wouldn’t have survived as a literary figure at all. Certainly, his name would be no more familiar to most of us than are those of Beaumont and Fletcher or Thomas Marston.

The point is that every age has its Laverne and Shirleys or Brady Bunches, or Married with Childrens and has even produced the comparatively easy humor of its Seinfelds, the romantic melodrama of its The Waltons, and marginally silly imaginative speculations of its X-Files or Star Treks. But it’s also produced its Twelve Angry Men, its Requiem for a Heavyweights, its Roots, Forsyte Sagas, Upstairs Downstairs, and I, Claudiuses, as well as its The Sopranos and Deadwoods.

Every age has also produced its version of celebrity books and biographies. And every age has had its share of naysayers. Samuel Clemens, whose satiric disparagement of Fenimore Cooper is legendary, also pronounced one library to be “excellent” on the basis that the librarians “had the good taste” to exclude all volumes by Jane Austen, “whom the British mercifully permitted a natural death.” Such an execution was, apparently, the precise intention of Laurence Sterne’s neighbors, who legendarily refused to rescue him from a frozen pond when he fell through the ice, so upset were they over the puerile contents of Tristram Shandy. We are also reminded that readers were so outraged by E.M. Forster’s Passage to India that travelers passing through the Suez Canal littered the surface of the Red Sea with copies thrown overboard in disgust; incensed and overly pious readers burned copies of Ulysses as trash; and in the thirties, school boards across the country had Arthur Conan Doyle’s collected works banned from school libraries because they were deemed “a popular distraction.”

The same thing has happened to The Tropic of Cancer, The Naked and the Dead, Suddenly Last Summer, Invisible Man, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Catcher in the Rye, Equus, and In Cold Blood. Even more recently, the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kozinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and of course, Mark Twain, have been targeted, although their novels are commonly studied as part of the contemporary American literary tradition.

Paul Scott, author of the celebrated The Raj Quartet, which included The Jewel in the Crown (filmed, naturally, for PBS), once told me, “The greatest curse for a contemporary writer is to be labeled ‘popular.’ It is in their unpopularity, their obscurity, their obtuseness that their worth is measured, not in their appeal to a broad number of people.” Scott, who, as a literary agent, discovered John Brain and John Waine, among others, lamented that the true literary genius of these writers was thwarted by their being touted as “popular.”

“The worst thing that ever happened to John Fowels,” he said, “was to have published The French Lieutenant’s Woman. He’d have been called a ‘great writer’ otherwise, not merely a clever romanticist.”

The same might be said of John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Ann Rice, or even Stephen King, who from time to time aspire to write literary art, and sometimes come very close to achieving it, although they are fundamentally labeled as “popular,” a label that, somehow, has by no means tarnished the reputation of J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, or Pearl S. Buck, although it has relegated the works of H. G. Wells, C.S. Forester, and Edgar Rice Burrows, as well as Zane Gray, Ray Bradbury, and Dashiell Hammett to the “popular fiction” bin.

Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Erika Jong, Michael Crichton, and Ann Rand have all gone on record at one time or another stating that they were torn between the desire to be popular and widely read (to say nothing of well-paid for their work) and the desire to be taken seriously by the canonical arbiters of the academy. Edward Albee once stated that if he could exchange places with Neil Simon, he would. At least, he said, he would exchange incomes. But he just couldn’t write “easy plays,” works that appealed to the masses. “I’ve tried,” Albee said in response to a student’s question, “but I just can’t. I have to write for something higher.”

“Higher?” How so higher? Are height and width literally exclusive from lower and narrower? Are we, as readers, truly justified in scoffing at the common denominators of popular fiction? Are the paperback romances and westerns and crime novels that occupy grocery stores’ checkout lane racks truly nothing more than passing fancies, worthless trash, facile entertainments? How does one define “entertainment,” anyway? And who has the right to say that simply because something amuses, enthralls, occupies our hearts and minds for a space, however small, that it is somehow less worthy than a more artistically self-conscious effort that’s, well, often boring if not impossible to penetrate by any but the most intellectual mind?

It’s well to remember, just as with Shakespeare’s plays, early forms of the novel were penned out of a desire to appeal to a broad, common readership. Such works as Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Moll Flanders were all originally published as “entertainments,” couched in the pretense that these were “true histories,” not fictional recreations designed to amuse as much as to inform. If the blatantly literary efforts of Samuel Richardson were the only roots of the modern novel, chances are it would never have germinated.

The distinction between what is popular and what is literary, perhaps, defines the sort of stuff for which the word “ephemeral” was coined. Such works based on topical subjects and socially immediate themes have always been with us and always will be. We shouldn’t imagine that in Aristotle’s time, everyone sat around watching plays that had the consistent quality of Sophocles or Euripides, although by virtue of the recognition they achieved, it is assumed that they were the most popular writers of the day. Aristophanes seasons his plays with jokes about immediately prominent themes and happenings, as well as popular targets for satire, often referring directly to people who were expected to be present during a performance. Indeed, it might well be that Aristotle used their works as examples in The Poetics because he recognized their popular appeal as well as their literary (or philosophical) quality and wanted these works to become a standard for artistic excellence to fulfill his most fundamental dictum, that quality discourse both entertain and inform. Perhaps he wanted to point out that it was possible for something to be both widely appealing as well as intelligently written.

Nor should we imagine that people lay about reading The Fairy Queen or Paradise Lost or Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Hebrides when other, less literary or artistically pretentious efforts were at hand. Johnson himself, though he outwardly despised Henry Fielding as “an ostler,” surprised his biographer Boswell by revealing that he had read at least parts of Fielding’s novels, particularly Joseph Andrews, and he enjoyed Fanny Burney’s popular works as well. Even Chaucer’s audiences had the choice of listening to his work or to the wildly popular and bawdy Lays of Marie de France, which have only been regarded as literary efforts in recent centuries, and we shouldn’t forget that Hawthorne’s complaint about “That Damned Mob of Scribbling Women” wasn’t directed toward the Brontes or—Mark Twain’s complaint aside—even Jane Austen, but was rather directed toward the antebellum equivalent of the “romance writer,” the purveyors of the “easy read.”

But “romance” was the operative word of the time, a fine semantic hair-splitting between the tale written purely to entertain and a “novel,” which seemed designed only to titillate. But the titillation—the sentimentality, the adventure, even the sexual fantasy—in other words, the popular appeal of the novel is, after all, what sustained it and permitted it to develop as literary art.

Making the discernment between that which is literary and that which is popular is, then, a fool’s errand. Samuel Clemens, himself, desperately wanted to be popular in his work and to be wealthy from it, as well. He was ultimately disappointed in both endeavors. He openly envied Artemus Ward and Brett Harte, whose books and journalistic pieces received popular acclaim. Mark Twain’s opus was regarded as a “boy’s book” in some quarters; in others, it was branded as “unfit for boys to read.” Thus, he allied himself with one of the most popular writers of the day in a collaborative effort. His co-author had more than a dozen books in print and was the darling of the reading circles, ladies’ clubs, and the literary societies of the 1880s. Who was this paragon of popular literary effort? He was quite as popular then as Stephen King or Tom Clancy or John Grissom or Dan Brown are now, and his name was Charles Dudley Warner. I’m sure everyone today has his collected works on a sacred place on a prominent bookshelf.

So all this fret and bother about what people read is misplaced. The real worries should be why people read or, perhaps, if they read at all.

My preconceptions about literary worth changed when I started writing. They have changed more since. And the recent changes in New York publishing have altered it further, as editors are only interested in that which sells well. If it aspires to and achieves artistic status, all the better, but it’s the bottom line that determines the book’s worth and, more to the point, the author’s worth as a continuing writer. I do believe it is possible to write and even to publish literary effort, but it’s no easier to sell that to the general public than it ever was. Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie, and Thomas Pyncheon may be the best-selling literary authors of our day, but they write books that most people don’t read. Even many people who buy them don’t read them. They’d rather read Caleb Carr or Mary Higgins Clark or James Michener or, God help us, Robert James Waller. The others they tend to place on their shelves, mentally filing them away under the “life’s too short” category and saving them for emergencies such as nuclear war, when they’ll be grateful for any reading matter they can get their hands on.

And while I’m sure that there are those, even today, who regularly curl up with a hefty volume by Dostoevsky, Thackery, or Henry James, who can’t wait to get home every night so they can dive back into Proust or Pamela, I have to admit, that in the case of the latter, I’d prefer to spend my return to the eighteenth century in Tom Jones, a book that was unashamedly written to be popular. To evoke an anecdotal cliché, I may take a copy of War and Peace with me every summer vacation, but I probably prefer the latest Andrew Vacchs or Robert Ludlum for my actual poolside reading.

But even if one’s taste runs to the more puerile and pulchritudinous passages of popular pulp, that’s nothing to be embarrassed about—or to apologize for. The right attitude is to keep an open mind and to laugh when some patched-sleeved, Berkinstocked pedant, such as myself, announces that this or that is “trash” or “garbage,” while busily stuffing the latest thriller, western, or horror novel under his coat. You see, we know, even if we won’t admit, that it’s possible for even a Jacqueline Smith or Nancy Taylor Rosenburg to turn a good phrase, create a memorable character, and to evoke the same muse that moved Ann Bradstreet or George Sand. But if one knows Bradstreet and Sand, then one’s ability to recognize the better efforts of the Smiths and Rosenburgs is heightened. And this is the point of reading widely and well, after all.

TROUT FISHING IN TEXAS

“Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.”

—Shakespeare

At the outset, a couple of points should be clarified: First, the whole idea of trout fishing in Texas is ridiculous. I mean, Texas has some great rivers. In general, the fishing on them can be a rewarding activity. Among those fine waterways, the Guadalupe River stands out as one of the best sporting streams in the state. It has fine scenery, exciting tubing and canoeing possibilities, and it’s just plain pretty, even when it’s a low flow. Shallow water ordinarily makes for good fishing, particularly good trout fishing. Even so, there is something wrong with angling for rainbow trout on the Guadalupe. It’s sort of like hunting moose in Georgia or caribou in New Mexico. In a way, it’s not entirely unlike hunting African antelope or bighorn sheep down around Refugio or Falfurias, something that a great many people actually do, for some reason. Even if native game is imported to a particular location and made available for sportsmen, pursuing it in the wrong place seems kind of silly. Some sports are just best left where they belong. Trout fishing is one of them.

Most pictures of trout anglers are associated with bright covers of outdoorsmen’s magazines and beer commercials. They’re quite familiar even to people who never fish at all. The fisherman stands thigh-deep in a rushing blue stream, surrounded by the snowcaps of the High Rockies; he is clad in battered fedora, chest-waders, plaid flannel shirt; a net is attached to his fishing vest, a creel strapped to his belt. Over his head snakes out the line of his fly rod, to which is attached a carefully made, home-tied fly. Occasionally, one sees him lifting a twelve-inch beauty in his net, the white water of the nearby rapids splashing about his thighs, a broad smile of accomplishment on his face. It doesn’t take much to make the picture appealing, particularly when one imagines that same angler sitting down that night beside a roaring fire over which sizzle a half-dozen freshly caught rainbow trout. As one ad always used to say, “It doesn’t get any better than this!”

It likely doesn’t. Of course, such bucolic scenes don’t explain how the fisherman found this picturesque spot among all the streams of the Rocky Mountains; nor does it say who toted all the heavy equipment—tent, cooking utensils, ice chests, half-dozen rods, three tackle boxes, and a case or two of iced beer and side dishes up the side of that mountain. Trail guides and native bearers are kept well out of the lens of the advertising camera.

Trout fishing in Texas, though, is a somewhat different enterprise. The rivers are generally green or brown, for one thing, and you can pull your vehicle right up to the bank of most of them. There are no snowy peaks; rather, the sides of limestone bluffs and hardscrabble hills are overgrown with scrub cedar, juniper, and prickly pear. Instead of picturesque aspen, birch, and blue spruce lining the banks, Texas rivers are flanked with cypress and sycamore, the latter of which will spot anything parked beneath it with ugly, indelible brown drippings. The banks themselves are rarely grassy. More often they’re covered with sharp gravelly rock. The average angler arrives in a rusty pickup truck and fishes in jeans, a gimme cap, and a sweatshirt with the logo of some NFL or NBA team emblazoned between its whacked off sleeves, although multiple stains from tobacco and spilled barbeque sauce more than likely have rendered the individual’s loyalty illegible.

Also, the trout cooking in margarine on Teflon at the end of a day’s fishing will look somewhat different from the advertised Colorado cuisine. One will be lucky, in fact, if he has two or three that are half the length of his forearm; and, because they will have come from fish farms, most of them will have been caught on corn or worms, not on the carefully created, multi-colored flies which are placed carefully on the end of an angler’s line, only to be spirited away when they snag some flotsam discarded by a careless camper upstream.

A second point requiring clarification, although it should be obvious by now, is that I am no serious fisherman. A serious fisherman is a guy who rises before dawn and has landed two or three “keepers” before the sun breaks the horizon. A serious fisherman is outfitted in at least five-hundred dollars’ worth of mostly useless equipment, not counting a boat or canoe. A serious fisherman knows the difference between a Bassmaster and a Bassbuster, an Evenrude and a Mercury. A serious fisherman has sonar, radar, depth finders, trolling motors, wet wells, dry wells, CB radios, and his wife’s name on the stern (to prevent him from forgetting it, I assume). A serious fisherman spends hours reorganizing his tackle box, reads fishing magazines, has topographical maps of every lake in five hundred miles, and watches all the fishing shows on television. A serious fisherman has a calendar on the wall with the days when this fish or that fish are “running,” “spawning,” or doing whatever else fish do to make them seem more catchable than otherwise. A serious fisherman is a consummate liar and an eternal optimist. If he’s dedicated at all, he’s probably on his way to alcoholism or bankruptcy or both. A serious fisherman doesn’t even have to like fish as a food, but he talks about nothing else, dreams about nothing else. A serious fisherman would rather fish than make money or make love. A serious fisherman is, in sum, quixotic, obsessed, insane.

Now, a serious trout fisherman is all that, and more. He ties his own flies, strings his own reels. He dons absurd clothing, and can stand in a freezing stream with water up to his shriveled manhood for hours on end and cheerfully lose hook after hook, lure after lure in pursuit of the elusive and diminutive slippery prey that slide indifferently between his legs. A serious trout fisherman not only enjoys this particular brand of madness, he actually looks forward to it for months, weeks, and days until the trout are doing whatever they do to make themselves catchable. No matter how often he comes up with no fish at all—even if he never catches a single one—he can’t wait to come back and do it all over again. Life, for him, never becomes more perfect than when he’s fishing.

My idea of fishing is somewhat different. It recalls childhood memories of sitting on a bank with a cane pole and occasionally landing a perch or carp, which I usually threw back, not because I was concerned about being humane or ecologically sensitive, but because those particular fish were too small, too bony too make good eating, not that I would have had the first idea of how to clean or cook one, anyway. Occasionally, I might land a channel cat, which scared the bejesus out of me, so I didn’t keep them, either. It’s always summer in my recollections, and I recall it sort of a lazy, indolent activity, upset only by the labor of having to dig up some worms. I never had any real luck, though. I only recall one fishing expedition which saw me come home with anything like a catch. That day, a friend of mine and I stole a jon boat off the bank and used old boards to paddle out to the middle of a small man-made lake. For some reason, we got into a “hot spot” and landed thirty-six bass on grasshoppers. We would have had thirty-seven, but a snake attached himself to one of our fish while it was on the stringer, and we were so terrified, we cut it loose. Still, we stayed out there till we ran out of bait, and we returned in triumph to provide our families with a huge fish fry, complete with hush puppies. (Our mothers, of course, cleaned and cooked them; this is why real fishermen need to remember their wives’ names, so someone will clean and cook whatever they catch.)

We returned to the spot and re-stole the boat several times, but we never got another bite. I must have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, but I never forgot it. Unfortunately, the experience spoiled me for any angling that didn’t live up to that particular day. As a result, I sort of let fishing sleep in my memory. I just never could take it seriously after that.

###

Some years ago, though, my good friend, The Poet, rediscovered fishing as a hobby. His enthusiasm was deeply engrained and had slumbered for many years, but suddenly, he made fishing a priority in his life. Still, his early efforts were perfunctory; I recall finding him outside his office, flipping rods and casting weights down the hallway, comparing notes on rods and reels and fishing spots with other occasional anglers who happened by. His next step was to purchase a used RV, a mini-pickup with camper shell, which he financed by delivering the local newspaper. I presume his wife was less than enthusiastic about the rediscovered hobby.

After a few years of dedicated bank and dock fishing, including one adventure where he used a fly rod in the Gulf of Mexico surf and astonishingly landed a flounder, he increased his level of dedication a few notches by buying a used jon boat. This soon was replaced by a fairly nice fiberglass-hulled rig, which he proceeded to outfit with every accessory, toy, and other item of angling paraphernalia he could fit onto and still keep it afloat. Ultimately, he moved up in class to ocean-going vessels. Then one day, I drove by his house; he had a somewhat ostentatious Boston whaler jammed under his carport. His wife’s car was stuck out in the rain.

Her name was not on the boat, I noticed. I heard directly from her that she intended to clean no fish.

Even so, it was clear to me that he had become that most intrepid of sportsmen, the inveterate fisherman. It was and is safe to say that he would rather fish than work; he would rather fish than eat. He would rather fish, it appeared, than breathe. By virtue of this newfound dedication to angling and boating, he secured a gubernatorial commission as a captain in the Texas Navy.

Pressed more by friendship and a willingness to provide camaraderie on various outings than by any desire actually to fish, I joined him on several fishing junkets. I was a loyal companion through the fiberglass boat period. For that while, we fished many of the waterways of southeast Texas, fresh and salt water. Often we pulled in one or two decent-sized fish, and we enjoyed more than a few good meals from our efforts. I reckoned that each dining experience cost us only about $570 in tackle, time, bait, to say nothing of licenses and beer and damage to our vehicles, clothes, equipment and egos. But it was the experience that counted; he assured me that it never got any better than that.

Trout fishing was never in our plans, though. We talked about it in the same dreamy way hunters talk about stalking big game such as bear or rhinoceroses. Trout fishing was something that belonged to other climes, to the sporting fairylands of the Northwest; it was not a sport for Texans, at least not for poor academic types who can’t afford trail guides and native bearers. Still, the covers of Field and Stream and like publications along with assorted beer commercials made trout fishing seem terribly appealing.

Thus, when The Poet called me some years after I’d relocated to points north and west, it was a surprise to me to learn that trout fishing was his motivation. He announced that the State of Texas was about to release thousands of rainbow trout on the Guadalupe River. He wanted me to rendezvous with him near New Braunfels to wade in that pretty green water and catch our limits. We would camp out on the bank, he posited, and he would provide all necessary gear. He asserted that another friend of his had limited for several days using only spinners, but if worse came to worse, we could fish with corn for bait. “They’re dumb hatchery trout,” he said, enthusiasm swimming in his voice. “They’ll bite on anything.”

I cast my mind out to my storeroom, where my fishing tackle reposed in some forgotten corner, a hopeless tangle of line and hooks, then wondered where I’d put my tackle box when we moved some years before. I wanted to demur—a cold front was coming, and it was still wintertime—but I gave in. Fishing is ordinarily considered to be a solitary sport, a time for rumination, consideration of life’s vagaries and individual expectations. It is an individual, relaxing endeavor. Camping, however, is a lonely business unless there’s someone to talk to. I needed a day or two off, and while I would have preferred a weekend on a beautiful beach somewhere, New Braunfels and the Hill Country had always held a special place in my heart. And The Poet was a friend in need of company on this expedition. So I accepted. Then he told me the bad news.

I had to buy a trout stamp and invest also in an “Ultra Light” rig, complete with four-pound-test line. Some sort of law governed both requirements. He asked if I had a fly rod and waders; I confessed that I owned neither, so he said he would provide such. (His generosity expands when fishing is involved.) I betook myself to a sporting goods store, even so, and I bought some camping accessories I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t bring—like a coffee pot and some toilet tissue. I also purchased some food (I never rely on the “catch of the day” to provide supper), some lures, and other miscellany. I laid out more than $150 for two days of trout fishing in Texas.

That was a mere fraction of what I could have spent. Even a quick glance at the “fly fishing” section of the shop revealed a veritable forest of accessories, most of which I’d never heard of. There were clippers and nippers, fly floatants and dryers, headlamps, hook sharpeners, retractors, strike indicators, and thermometers, knot tiers, wading belts, a variety of nets, lines, lures, dressings and cleaners, vests, rods, creels of all sizes and shapes, and some oddity called a “ketchum release.” There was also a ready stock of flannel shirts, floppy hats, gloves, and luggage to carry it all in. It occurred to me that Lewis and Clark probably left St. Louis less well-provisioned than the average trout fisherman galloping off to the Texas Hill Country.

Nevertheless, I packed my meager gear and made the trip. I arrived, as directed, on Wednesday afternoon on the banks of the Guadalupe, right off River Road outside New Braunfels. There is no public access to the Guadalupe there; the entire stretch of this scenic river is owned by commercial enterprises which will provide entrance only for a fee. Admission to the camping area ran another $18 per person. For that, “guests” were to be provided with a parking space, picnic table, and long-neglected port-a-john; there were no showers, potable water sources, or grassy areas. The live oaks lining the trail down to the river were festooned with signs forbidding swimming, tubing, canoeing, climbing trees, hiking, throwing rocks, hunting, drinking alcohol, gathering firewood, trespassing, digging for worms or searching for arrowheads. I feared that reading, conversation, or looking around might also be forbidden, but apparently these leisures were overlooked by the regulatory services.

This was a typical Texas fishing camp. It was not, however, an ideal place to stay. My idea of “roughing it” is settling for a non-franchised motel and no room service. But camp out we would; I was prepared for whatever discomforts might arise as I drove up to the gate. The proprietor, a gruff, elderly gentleman with a Yankee accent and no apparent sense of humor, carefully checked my vehicle to make sure I was transporting no guns, dogs, drugs, women, wanted criminals, or any materials with which I might build a fire (another illusion shattered); he also inspected my trout stamp and fishing tackle before directing me to The Poet’s campsite and wishing me well. As the earlier trout release had happened the week before, he assured me the state hatchery truck would be arriving momentarily to deliver more fish to the stream. It never showed up.

###

The Poet was already mid-river when I arrived. I had to admire his approximation of the picturesque angler. He had outfitted himself in the height of fisherman fashion. He had a fly rod in hand, a smile on his face, and no trout in his creel. To his credit, though, he had not accessorized himself in as lavish a style as I now knew was possible. In fact, he looked a bit scruffy, more like a traditional Texas fisherman merely pretending to angle. “They’re in here!” he called out to me. “I can see ’em.”

It took me the better part of a half-hour to ready myself to join him. I decided to forgo the fly rod, and reached for my new “Ultra Light” rig. I had terrible trouble mastering the art of tying a lure onto a four-pound-test line. It has the consistency of gossamer, and if I pulled tightly enough to fasten the knot, it broke. Finally, however, I managed to secure it well enough, and I donned The Poet’s spare pair of waders and stepped into the bright green flow of the Guadalupe. The right boot immediately filled with icy water.

“Those may leak,” The Poet said when my blasphemous declamations caught his attention. “There’s some duct tape in the truck,” he offered helpfully.

By this time, I was wet up to my right knee, so I decided to tough it out and made my first cast, just as I had seen on television, right over a shelf of rock which should provide excellent cover for fish. The lure snaked out beautifully, then hung up on a low-hanging mesquite limb. I gave it a light tug, and the line broke.

I waded out of the water to fetch another spinner. While on the bank, I removed the waders, emptied the boot, applied the duct tape, then returned. It leaked even worse now, but I managed to grit my teeth against the chill and to make five or six decent casts before losing the second lure. The Poet, apparently tired of my accusatory discourse with the Deity, waded out of sight downstream.

After about three hours of unmatched pleasure, I was gratified to see him returning. The score for the first day’s efforts, using lures as ante: Trout-22, Fishermen-0. I also had managed to stumble into a hole. Water spilled into the other leg of the waders, so I was soused to the crotch. Now, as we emerged from the water, it was starting to rain, so we began setting up our camp in an icy drizzle.

The tent went up without more than the usual amount of cursing, and soon we had coaxed a flame from our propane stove and cooked and eaten the steak and drunk the wine (smuggled in past the proprietor by secreting it in a book bag) I brought for the first night’s meal. The Poet retired early and vowed to hit the water before dawn, if possible, and to limit-out before the hatchery truck arrived with fresh stock. I figured that the trout would wait for sunrise if I wanted to sleep in, and I had doubts about the truck’s reliability, but I said nothing. By the first gray light of the next morning, sure enough, he was back in midstream, and I, attempting to be a good sport, was wet to the crotch again. The dousing of the day before had apparently opened a leak in the other boot, and both filled as soon as I stepped into the river. At least the rain had moved on.

We took a breakfast break at midmorning, but we still had caught no fish. I, in the meantime, had sacrificed a half-dozen rather expensive lures to the Guadalupe’s submerged rocks and had given up on the notion of catching anything more than a cold. It was nearly three in the afternoon, actually, before The Poet landed his first rainbow. I was nearly as excited as he as I flayed and stumbled in my soggy waders through the water toward him, eager to inspect his trophy.

Now, the only trout with which I was previously familiar (apart from a restaurant plate, of course) was the famous speckled variety from the Texas Gulf Coast. They must be fourteen inches long to keep, and they weigh in at several pounds. The flopping rainbow on The Poet’s stringer was nearly half the length of my hand. I had used larger bait when he and I fished Lake Sabine. I expressed delight at his triumph, but inwardly I conjured a dream of a supper of New Braunfels wurst, complete with potato salad and cole slaw, with cherry cobbler for dessert. The Poet tarnished the vision by announcing that with “five or six more,” we would eat well that night.

Resigned, and out of spinners, I fetched a bag of corn and a supply of tiny hooks from his truck and joined him once more.

Clearly, his determination to trout fish in Texas was overriding his epicurean common sense.

I previously tried the fly rod for several hours with no other result than I kept stumbling and filling my waders with fresh and even colder water. One angler down the way actually caught two trout on flies, but it took him six hours to do it. I reckoned that fly fishing was about the hardest work the sport offers. You never stand still and just think. You never relax. You’re always casting the tiny, weightless flies out onto the stream and allowing them to sink or float and drift down to where the line is made taut by the current; then you whip it around and do it all over again while you try not to lose your footing on slippery stones and fall into a hole that would swallow a small car. How one could catch a fish in this manner bewildered me. People claim to do it all the time, but I wished to be drowned in my leaky waders if I could see how the process is more productive than sitting on the bank and bait fishing. At least with that method, you can be still and consider life for a moment or two after you cast. And the line is generally heavy enough that the featherweight of the bait won’t snap it off before it hits the water.

With the corn, though, I had better luck. At least something was stealing my bait. I still lost about a dozen hooks when they snagged on errant rocks and busted the four-pound-test line. In the meantime, The Poet added four of the small, brightly colored trout to his collection. “The next one’s yours,” he assured me. Indeed it was! My very next cast brought back a reasonably large (by the standards of the day) rainbow trout. It was my single catch of the day, of the entire trip, for that matter. I figured, taking into account gasoline and lost lures and hooks and flies, that the tiny fish I delicately placed next to The Poet’s limit cost me $145.

This did not count the cost of Sudafed, which I would be imbibing by the liter the very next day.

With that catch, though, I had had enough trout fishing for one outing. I was wet to the waist, cold, miserable, and my ankles ached from more than a half-dozen sprains sustained as I tried to navigate the river’s stony bed in my water-logged waders. If the water hadn’t been so cold, I probably would have been in serious pain. I limped and slogged out to the bank, stripped down to my sodden jeans and socks, and sulked the rest of the afternoon away. But The Poet was undaunted. He fished until dark. My vision of New Braunfels smoked sausage evaporated utterly when The Poet announced that we had enough trout for an evening meal. “Get the butter,” he said. “I’ve got potatoes in the truck.”

###

I have to say that the trout The Poet prepared over our sputtering stove that night was utterly delicious. Seasoned only with salt, pepper, and a bit of lemon, supplemented with fried potatoes and other vegetables, it was satisfying and filling in spite of our diminutive catch. I was surprised and even came to realize that I probably ate better on the banks of that soughing river than I would have in New Braunfels, where I would have spent twenty bucks or more for a meal I would have had trouble enjoying for all the stares and frowns we would have elicited from other diners once they got a whiff of us. The temperature also plummeted, and I suspect that getting that close to a motel would have ended our camping experience, as well. The only heat we had in our frigid camp came from a propane lantern. After our dinner, we drank good quality whiskey, also smuggled in, and smoked and laughed and talked, and we found the camaraderie we had come to the river to enjoy.

On the other hand, had the state hatchery truck shown up, and had we landed our possession limits on flies and lures instead of Del Monte’s Whole Kernel, had the fish been larger than happily swimming around in our living room aquarium, had my equipment been a bit more comfortable and efficient, I might have been happier with the whole notion of trout fishing in Texas. Somehow, even with the fine meal and companionship topping off our trip, the whole idea of angling for trout in the Guadalupe still seems ridiculous.

###

Fishing, generally, is a sport for people who are dedicated to the proposition of collecting the equipment, accoutrements, and experiences themselves. Catching the fish is a secondary or maybe even a tertiary priority for most; it’s the preparation, the activity, and talking about it afterwards that makes it worthwhile. More than one angler of my acquaintance has admitted that the best part of any fishing trip is preparing for it. Not catching anything, or merely catching them and throwing them back is an ordinary part of the whole enterprise. The goal isn’t to provide dinner; the goal is to fish. That, it seems, is well enough, and it just doesn’t get any better than that.

But I think that I’ve had about as much trout fishing in Texas as any one man can stand. It’s just not a sport for the Lone Star State. The trout aren’t indigenous to our waterways, and they don’t seem to have enough savvy to bite flies. There is something about catching them on cooked corn that takes away from the art—even from the poetry—of the whole endeavor. It’s also a fairly expensive business that produces, even at its best, some very small fish. Rather like surfing in Arizona and snow skiing in Florida, where some enterprising tourist-trappers have set up artificial conditions for such activities, trout fishing in Texas just isn’t the right sport in the right place. While I admire The Poet’s determination to have the experience without the expense of a trip to Colorado or Canada, I think that our next fishing expedition should be directed toward any of the several varieties of bass in southwestern lakes or perhaps the catfish along the rivers of East Texas. I’ll leave the trout streams of Texas to those who wade in dreams.

ELVIS AND US

“If one plays bad music, people don’t listen,

and if one plays good music, people don’t talk.”

—Oscar Wilde

I never was an Elvis fan. I realize that such heresy, when said aloud, leaves the speaker liable for the same sort of nasty looks reserved for those who ask for the smoking section in restaurants; but I can’t help it. I just never was a big fan of the music—or the person—of Elvis Presley.

Oh, I must confess that as a teenager, I listened to his music on the radio and danced to it at the Teen Canteen where, if I was lucky, Sherry French would be untaken for one of The King’s slow ballads. But he really wasn’t “The King” then; he was just Elvis Presley: “Elvis the Pelvis,” a somewhat ridiculous country boy who made silly girls do silly things when he accused them of being “Hound Dogs” and swung his hips in a suggestive manner. I remember Vicki Crossland, big sister of one of my friends, actually wore out her 45-rpm copy of “Love Me Tender” and cried real tears every time she spun that scratchy plastic on her portable phonograph in their garage. (Her father banned Elvis and his music from the house.) Jack, her brother, and I would hide behind the stack of used batteries their father kept in the corner and laugh ourselves comatose while she sighed and swooned all by herself among the greasy cobwebs and broken lawnmowers.

By the time I arrived in college, I regarded Elvis as just another of those “older” and already dead stars—like Buddy Holly or Patsy Cline or Johnny Horton—makers of music that had been completely routed by the British Invasion but that, somehow, continued to hang around on the ghostly fringes of AM radio. Elvis’s music was old fashioned, a little downbeat, and with the exception of “In the Ghetto,” thoroughly lacking in the social consciousness required of most of the songs of the late sixties.

He also made incredibly bad movies. I mean, most of the Beatles’ or anybody else’s films were stupid, mindless funk; but they were at least fun to watch, and the lip-synching was fairly precise. All Elvis ever seemed to do in his films was stand around and look handsome and soulful in between badly staged musical numbers that included plastic-haired women dancing around in various stages of undress. Elvis, to coin a sixties phrase, just wasn’t “my bag.”

Later, when Revolution was giving way to Rolex among the baby boomers, my suspicions about Elvis being over the hill were confirmed by the grotesque image of the overweight King cavorting around the stage at Caesar’s Palace crooning “I Did it My Way” to a bunch of overdressed, overjeweled, and overaged swooners. When he threw his sweat-soaked scarf into the grappling manicures of Las Vegas and elsewhere, I could only shake my head and link him with other sad examples of middle-age heartthrobs such as Tom Jones. Like Perry Como, Tony Bennett, or Andy Williams, Elvis, I was sure, was done. He didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, or even Jim Croce. He might have been the man who combined R&B with C&W to produce Rock and Roll; they might call him “The King”; but insofar as I and most of the contemporary music lovers I knew were concerned, “The King” was nothing but a paper-crown has-been, a poor man’s Frank Sinatra, soon to be as forgotten as Fabian or Wayne Newton. “Elvis,” I proclaimed when his name came up, “ ‘has left the building’ for good.”

I was wrong.

###

I remember the week that Elvis died. Not the day. I wasn’t so into Elvis that I marked the day, but what I did mark was the political cartoon showing Elvis entering Heaven. Bing Crosby’s recent death had prompted a newspaper sketch illustrating a giant hand welcoming the man who made Christmas forever white onto a cloud-floored stage. Now, the same graphic pundit showed the beloved Bing, the man with the million-dollar growth in his throat (or so it was rumored), offering the spangled and jump-suited Elvis a guitar as he was ushered through the Pearly Gates. This, I thought, was touching, but a bit over the top. I mean, I didn’t have much feeling about Bing Crosby then; he belonged to my father’s generation. But I had less assurance that “Elvis the Pelvis” was destined for a celestial pop choir. Unsettling rumors about drugs and other things had already surfaced; and Graceland, Presley’s adult home, had instantly become a musical mecca for thousands of devoted vassals, anxious to tread the very carpets of the stately mansion in which the chief Royal of Rock had lived. The Deity, I always believed, could be particularly nasty about self-appointed temporal gods; it seemed to me that Bing and Elvis, especially, had highly dubious claims on eternal star billing.

Those were dark days, though. Watergate was synonymous with scandal; Vietnam was still a fresh and bloody memory; war raged in Central America, Asia, and the Middle East; and all of us were anxiously awaiting Reaganomics to trickle down. A lot of us expected music to once more take the lead in calling for social and political reform, for peace and love and brother- and sisterhood. What we got instead was Willy and Waylon and a collection of “Austin Outlaws,” who were no less silly than Elvis, and who, we imagined, demonstrated in their personal excesses the danger of popular music’s effects on those who produced it. Popular stars were at a nadir, then. Comedians were setting themselves on fire with their own narcotics, musicians were drowning in swimming pools, disco continued, and the punk rockers had a stranglehold on overtly sexual unintelligible lyrics. It looked like Rock and Roll was finally dead.

It was about then that I visited Graceland for the first time. I didn’t go to Memphis for that purpose; but since I was there with some friends—all of whom shared my cynical view of “The King” and his courtiers—we decided to kill an afternoon wandering the grounds and making satiric marvel of the purple opulence required to sustain a true rock idol. We found what we were looking for.

At the time, Graceland was a much more primitive place to visit than it soon became. On that steamy October afternoon, we parked in a dilapidated strip center across the street, braved traffic on the newly renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard (we couldn’t believe that, for starters), passed through the lyre gate, and plunked down a couple of dollars each for the privilege of hiking up to the mansion. Once there, we were told, if a large enough group gathered, a tour would be conducted. Our group’s size failed to meet the standard, so we were permitted to wander through the house more or less on our own. Stern security guards were the only signs of life inside.

We saw the ground floor with the living and dining rooms, the basement TV room with its three sets, the pool room with its fabric-covered walls and ceiling, and the jungle room with its fountain and gargantuan, ugly furniture. And we saw mirrors, lots of mirrors. Ceilings and walls made of mirrors appeared throughout the house. “Maybe just a touch narcissistic,” one of my party whispered.

Our self-guided tour was marked by soft sneers at the complete lack of taste, the artlessness of the furnishings, the horrendous absence of any eye for color, form, or even fashionable mundanity. Graceland was, we whispered to each other, painfully mediocre: the typical residence of someone who came into more money than he knew what to do with. Couldn’t Elvis locate a decent decorator? Couldn’t he at least appear to live like a king?

From the house, we were directed by signs to the Meditation Garden, where The King and members of his family were laid to rest beneath bronze slabs. This turned out to be both the high and the low point of the tour. Situated adjacent to the smallish swimming pool, it is bordered on the other side by a semicircle of stone and stained glass. Flowers bedecked Elvis’s grave to the point of obscuring the writing etched on his sarcophagus, which is headed by an “eternal flame” enclosed in glass. It was out on the day we visited.

When we came up, another small group stood there, listening to piped recordings of Elvis singing “The Old Rugged Cross” and “Amazing Grace” over and over; some were openly weeping. One woman prayed over a rosary.

“What does that stand for?” one of my companions asked, pointing to a logo engraved on Elvis’s slab. The letters T C and B were arranged around a lightning bolt.

I spoke without thinking. “Tacky, Crass, and Banal,” I said.

A woman standing nearby turned on me and slashed my arm with a plastic long-stemmed rose. “Have a little respect,” she ordered in a tearful hiss. “This is His grave.” She then threw her polyethylene tribute to The King atop his slab and rushed off.

“It stands for ‘Taking Care of Business,’ ” another mourner explained softly. “That was his philosophy.”

I was stunned. I would have expected this sort of reaction in Jerusalem at the purported tomb of Christ, or at the Kennedy Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, or even, perhaps, at the site of Custer’s Last Stand. Once, I had even shushed an overloud American tourist in Canterbury Cathedral while I stood pensively over the spot where Thomas á Becket was martyred.

But this was the grave of Elvis Aaron Presley. Rock and Roll Star. Born 1935, died as a result of a heart attack that possibly was induced by an overdose of prescription drugs. Or not. But it was only Elvis Presley, in any case. His contributions to Western Civilization included no grand “I have a dream” speeches, or “Ask not what your country can do for you” admonitions, but rather such gems of wisdom as “That’s All Right [Mama]” and “Don’t Step on My Blue Suede Shoes.” Elvis Presley: Poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who moved from sometimes truck driver to radio crooner to recording artist to . . . to king? Hell, I thought, he never even won a Grammy for his pop music—only for his gospel recordings—he didn’t write his own stuff, and he didn’t even play a great guitar, not like Pete Townsend, Jimi Hendricks or Eric Clapton. He wasn’t John Lennon or Mick Jagger or Otis Redding or James Brown or Elton John. He wasn’t even Johnny Rivers or Ray Charles or Billy Joel. He couldn’t croon like Gene Pitney, lacked Roy Orbison’s range, and was unable even to wade into the schmaltz of Bobby Goldsboro. You couldn’t make out to his music the way you could to Johnny Mathis or Nat King Cole; there was no Moody Blues mystique or driving intensity such as came from the Doors. There wasn’t even the frayed and dusty romance of Blood, Sweat, and Tears or Credence;, or the slickness of The Association or Chicago. Elvis’s time passed quickly. He belonged to the same generation of has-beens that included Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Herman’s Hermits, and that other notorious pretender to the throne, Jerry Lee Lewis, who at least wrote most of his own music.

Sure, he had a lot of gold and platinum records; sure, he made a fortune in movies and concerts; but he belonged to another time and place, to another generation.

In short, I had heard the rockers singing, and Elvis just didn’t sing for me.

This opinion was affirmed, I thought, when we departed this gaudy shrine in south Memphis. Along the stone wall fronting the estate was a collage of graffiti scrawlings. They read, “We did it in your pool, Elvis,” and “I smoked a joint in Elvis’s john.” And those were fairly typical of the less reverent observations etched on the rocks out front. I breathed a sigh of relief. For a moment, back at the grave site, I thought the world had gone mad and that Elvis had somehow been beatified.

“In ten years, this place will be a parking lot,” I predicted to my friends. “It’s too near the airport to survive.”

Wrong again.

###

A little over a decade later, I revisited Graceland. It was a deliberate trip, this time, a pilgrimage to seek out, if I could, what exactly keeps The King alive.

Did I say “alive?” Yes. That’s the word. Apart from tabloid reports of Elvis sightings, there is no doubt that Elvis Presley lives. Oh, I don’t mean that whatever corpse interred in the Meditation Garden didn’t belong to Elvis Aaron Presley, and I don’t think that the now seventy-something crooner turns up in supermarkets and shopping malls, taunting his former fans with a ghostly shade. I mean rather that he’s more alive than Lennon and Hendricks, more alive than Holly or Cline or Cash, more alive than Jack or Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.; even more alive than Ronald Reagan. In a way, he’s more alive than most of the singers and performers and icons of culture who are still drawing breath and interest on their fantastic earnings. For Elvis is alive in the heart of America.

Anyone who doubts this must have spent the past thirty years on Mars. That might not even be distant enough; we have no real idea just how far radio waves carry into space. It could be that even beyond Pluto, Elvis impersonators thrive. It’s possible that some of them, like their terrestrial counterparts, derive a pretty good living from dressing up in white, spangly jumpsuits, driving around in pink Cadillacs, and attempting to imitate the deep baritone melodies of The King.

It doesn’t take a public affairs expert to note that in America, at least, Elvis-ana is part and parcel of craft shows, flea markets, and garage sales as well as some of the finer gift shops around the country. In some homes his portrait hangs next to that of presidents or popes. From ceramic statues to paintings on black velvet, from authentic original 45s to signed album covers, Elvis memorabilia and collectables constitute a fairly decent industry in America. There are more Elvis experts than there are Elvis stories to tell, more active fan clubs devoted to Elvis than to any half a dozen living artists, and Elvis film festivals are frequent annual events.

So I had to go back, and I had to determine what there was about Elvis—apart from the invention of the CD rerelease—that had made his recordings sell more since his death than they did before, what kept middle-aged America steering their motor homes to Memphis, what, indeed, kept anyone else from seriously pretending to the throne of popular music. The answer, I figured, had to be at Graceland. I must have overlooked it the first time.

Graceland had not become a parking lot. Instead, they built a parking lot for it behind an elaborate Graceland Center that houses, among other things, slick, modern shops full of Elvis souvenirs. There is a movie theatre that shows a documentary about Elvis’s life, a museum that contains nothing but Elvis’s motor vehicles, and a tour that takes visitors through Elvis’s Lisa Marie and Hound Dog II Jetstar planes that have been towed in and parked nearby. There is a post office and a bookstore and a record shop. Some of the old tourist courts along the boulevard have been refurbished in pinks and blues and advertise “Twenty-four Hour Elvis Movies” in each room. And, of course, there is Graceland itself.

Today, one need not—indeed, cannot—hike up to the front door. After purchasing a ticket in Graceland Center, a guard directs visitors aboard a shuttle, which carries capacity loads directly up the tree-lined drive. There, a uniformed tour guide greets each group, and the lecture begins. Facts about Graceland are given first: Elvis bought the house for $100,000 in 1957; there are 13.8 acres on the property; he wanted a place “in the country” for his entire family, etc. Then, guests are ushered inside amid stern warnings against using flash photography or venturing off the approved route.

Each room is described in minute detail, including when the furniture was purchased and who designed or selected it. The photos and paintings on the wall are noted, and anecdotes are related about various items or happenings that took place in each chamber. We learn, for example, that Elvis got the idea for three sets in the TV room from Lyndon B. Johnson, who, in the days before PIP, enjoyed watching all three network newscasts at once. The fabric wall and ceiling covering in the pool room was suggested to Elvis by a picture in a magazine. He selected the oversized furniture in the jungle room because it reminded him of Hawaii, and he didn’t take more than thirty minutes to pick it out. He had the ceiling of that room carpeted so he could use the room to make records, and Lisa Marie and her father regarded it as their favorite room in the house.

Other exhibits have opened on the grounds, as well. Vernon Presley’s office, where Elvis’s fan clubs and business activities were centered, offers a brief film of his first press conference after returning from the service. The Trophy Building contains his awards, gold and platinum records, high school diploma, photographs, army uniform, and hundreds of items of costume and personal effects from his life as both private individual and public ruler of popular music. And there’s the racquetball court, where he spent his last hour. The story goes that he was there with friends who were relaxing and planning the next tour, when he felt ill, retired to his bedroom, and was never seen again. At least not at Graceland.

Or was he? It is this question that perplexed me as I moved through this latter-day tour of Elvis’s home. On the surface, the Graceland complex appears to be nothing but a garish tribute to The King; it’s slicker than any pompadour Elvis ever wore, a cliché in yellow and white, preserved in time for the observations of both the curious and the faithful. But there’s no sense of undue reverence here, no feeling of standing on hallowed ground or sacred soil, no suggestion that supernatural greatness ever took up residence here. The guides, instead, tell homey anecdotes of Elvis’s life: tales of Christmas parties and friends’ birthday celebrations, of accidental spills and rips in the furniture, or of an afternoon when The King ordered a half-dozen motorcycles to amuse his guests, then turned around the next day and donated them all to charity.

It was a royal thing to do, perhaps; but it was also a human thing to do, the sort of thing that Elvis was famous for. And throughout the mansion are other evidences of his humanity. “Elvis liked it this way,” or “Elvis thought this would be nice,” or “Elvis wanted it this way,” is the most common explanation for why this color or that furnishing was chosen. There’s the impression throughout the house that Elvis’s ghost is still running about adjusting pillows and straightening pictures, making the house ultimately and completely his home, one designed and furnished and maintained “his way.”

As I walked about and ignored a persistent Elvis imitator (a tour guide said there was at least one in every crowd), who insisted on loudly amending and correcting all information given until he was escorted off the premises, I found myself looking at Elvis Presley’s home with a new eye. My former prejudices fell away. All at once, I came to understand something astounding: Graceland is not a monument. Nor is it a mausoleum. It’s merely a place where a man—a fairly ordinary man—lived. It’s not a memorial to a great star, who achieved fantastic wealth and fame and whose memory should be enshrined with the lonely or the brave. Rather, it is a common testimony to a common man who happened to do great things and to touch in some mysterious way a great number of people.

The fact is that he—or his music—still does, and that’s what turned Crosby’s Christmas from white to forever blue—“without you”; that’s what keeps Elvis alive.

###

Elvis Presley lives, I decided, because of the sort of person he was. Particularly because of the innate assumptions I bore at the time, and because I was most vehemently not an Elvis fan, I had previously presumed that he was a typical example of the more sensational cultural idols of the world, people for whom outrage and extravagance came as naturally as the sunrise, or in most cases, sunset. I assumed Graceland was just a Memphis boy’s poor attempt to imitate the Hollywood-style homes of so many rock, country and movie stars, professional ball players and a handful of successful novelists. I compared it to one of those thirty- and forty-room L.A. mansions sitting smack-dab in the richest residential real estate around, carefully remodeled and redecorated by imported interior designers, lavish in their multi-car garages, several swimming pools and hot tubs, elaborate private gyms and shooting ranges, manicured gardens, and expensive objets d’art. I looked for evidence of the millions of dollars even the lesser monarchs of popular culture routinely spend on their houses and their furnishings, for helipads and sophisticated security systems to insulate themselves from the prying eyes of fans who come to gawk at the symbols of their greatness and lavish displays of someone else’s good taste. I searched for signs of the tons of dope reportedly used in such castles of fame, of the fast women, fast cars, and fast fortunes squandered in their celebration of their own celebrity.

But Graceland was nothing like that. Instead it was homey, warm, nice—and homely, ugly, and intensely personal. It was these virtues I had viewed as faults before, and it was that observation that led me to decide that The King was unworthy of the crown. He didn’t live like a king, and kings should live like kings. Shouldn’t they? Or should they only “take care of business” and be admired, simply, for being themselves?

It was natural to assume that Elvis, of all people, would have made Graceland the symbol of the opulence he deserved, a veritable Xanadu, an apotheosis of squander and lust. After all, he earned it. He had a right to flaunt it.

But he didn’t. As I passed through Graceland this time, I discovered that there was no evidence of any debauchery or hedonism in the remains of Elvis’s life, no evidence of symbols for the sake of status or ornament for the sake of excess. Graceland simply wasn’t like that. And neither was The King.

###

Elvis Presley came onto the American cultural scene to answer the need of what some have called “The Quiet Generation,” those teenagers who emerged between bobbysoxers and beatniks, who preceded flower children and the “Me Generation.” His music recalls a more naïve time, an innocent time. It provides a unique window to the recent past through which one almost has to squint to see drive-in eateries with pony-tailed carhops who happily trotted out clip-on trays of greasy fries and chocolate malts to the occupants of hardtops, ragtops, and rods, cars that were titty-pink, bat-shit yellow, and candy-apple red. It was a time when guys wore ducktails and talked about engines that were “bored and stroked” and had dual carbs and twin pipes, when gals wore poodle-skirts and worried about marriage and kids more than college and careers. It was a time when a prom was a teenager’s biggest night, when a joint was where they served beer, when a high school diploma meant something. It was a time when Ike was in the Whitehouse and America was in first place in every way that mattered and most that didn’t.

There was the bomb, of course, and poverty, and labor problems; there was diphtheria and whooping cough, and a lot of people still got polio; there was subjugation based on gender, race, politics, and even just plain old attitude. But it was a simpler time, and one that lends itself easily to nostalgia, especially when there’s an Elvis song on the radio, and everyone remembers when “varsity” meant “star” and when a boy born in a shotgun house in rural Mississippi could, almost before he could buy a legal drink, make enough money to buy his mama an amazingly graceful mansion.

All of that is reflected in Graceland’s many mirrors. Placed strategically to make the house seem larger and more elegant, they have less to do with self-admiration than with an innocent desire to make modesty seem more elegant. And in the naiveté expressed in the relatively conservative appointments, one finds the sweetness, the genuineness, and the depth of character that was Elvis Presley. And, I think, it is that combination of qualities, that recollection through a glass brightly, as it were, that keeps Elvis alive, that ultimately has turned me into an Elvis fan.

It may all be a myth, of course, a legend, a public relations scam designed to keep Elvis’s record sales high and Graceland’s popularity intact. But real or not, it works. Over twenty million people have wandered through Elvis’s home in the past thirty years, and I think that few have truly come to worship or to mourn; even fewer have come to snicker, as I did on my first visit. Rather, I think they come to confirm that Elvis’s impact on our culture is lasting because of the integrity evident in the way he lived. I noticed, for example, that the largest exhibit in the Trophy Building is not a reflection of his celebrity; it is a huge plaque given to him by the grateful charities of Memphis in response to his generosity, for which, the tour guide stated, he took no tax credit. To do so, Elvis felt, was to negate the Christian impulse behind the gift.

I determined, at last, that there’s a modesty about Graceland, an honesty that suggests that he bought it, furnished it, and kept it as a home, not as a symbol of his success, a castle built to the glory of his reign.

I spent very little time around Elvis’s grave on this visit. I felt, somehow, that I had not been adequately shriven for my previous behavior. The music, though, was now more melodic, more tasteful. The crowd was less sorrowful, more pensive. The whole setting seemed less grotesque, somehow, more moderate, more in tune with the memory of the man who rested there. And the eternal flame was lit.

This time, when I left Graceland, I found the scrawled remarks on the front wall to be as numerous as before. But they were somehow more profound. “Elvis Lives,” was the most prevalent comment, but so was “I love you,” signed by both male and female names. Not a few notations had guitars or musical notes drawn next to some temporal devotion; and one said, “Elvis and Us.” That, I think, might have said it all.

###

That night I wandered around Beale Street in downtown Memphis. Unofficially, I guess, Beale Street is the “birthplace” of the blues, or at least of Rhythm and Blues, in much the same way that Memphis is the hometown of Elvis Presley. Muddy Waters played there, so did B.B. King, and Ike Turner, and Memphis Minnie; and so did Porkfat Coleman, Darin’ Danny DeVane, Creole Carol Caruthers, and hundreds of other “wanna-bes” and “never-weres,” whose grainy, dusty black and white photos hang next to those of The King in the shops and bars of Beale Street. In a sense, they’re all still there. The heavy blues beats bounce out of the clubs and cafés along the district, and it’s hard not to take a table and a cool drink and just sit and lose a few hours in the deeper, darker rhythms of life. Elvis Presley wasn’t the first to understand how pervasive and persuasive such rhythms were, or how they could move the masses to swoon, scream, and cry out for more. But he used them better than almost anyone in contemporary music.

There were and are better musicians, maybe, smoother crooners and harder rockers, but most of them quickly pass away, some long before they enter eternity to stand beside The King on the celestial stage. Indeed, when they get there, most of them will be lucky to open his act for him, or maybe play backup; for though they might have been a part of us for some short time, they will be gone. Elvis is still alive, still singing, still taking care of the business of recalling our past and making us sweetly sad if not for what we once were, perhaps for what we might have been. In short, The King was us, and I suspect he will be for a long, long time.

ERROR IN, ERROR OUT:

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE IMPACT OF THE WORD PROCESSOR ON COMPOSITION

“You write with ease to show your breeding,

but easy writing’s curst hard reading.”

—Sheridan

During the 2006 Golden Globes Awards, much was made of the comment by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry that he had composed most if not all his work previous to the award-winning script Brokeback Mountain, at least, on a typewriter. This came as no surprise to many who know Larry. At one time, he told me, he kept several identical machines located around the country where he was apt to find himself staying for a while. Even when word processing became far more user-friendly and economical, he stayed with the method that he had always known and preferred.

I, too, was a dedicated user of a typewriter when the age of the personal computer dawned. I completed two full books and probably drafted more than two hundred seminar papers, articles for publication, and other writing on a 1936-model Royal Elite. It had a sticking “D” key, and to this day, when I’m typing, I have a reflex to pull that key back up as soon as I hit it. I soon graduated to a more sophisticated electric machine, an IBM Keytronic; and, because I was both fast and accurate on it, I felt that, unlike most activities I’ve tried in life, I had a mastery of it. Certainly, I was comfortable with it. I assured a friend who urged me to abandon it for a computer word processor that I doubted I could ever give up my “tactile relationship” with the typing process, that immensely fulfilling sound and feel of a key striking paper, leaving an indelible mark. There was also the satisfaction of watching a stack of completed, typed pages grow as I worked.

Nevertheless, I soon abandoned my mechanical writing implements and shifted to the computer. It was necessary for my academic work, for one thing; and soon it became mandatory for any sort of communication, both professional and personal. Still, some twenty years later, when I watch an old film that features a close-up shot of a typewriter key striking a pristine white page, depicts the clackity-clack din of typewriters with their distinctive margin-alert bells filling an office space, I find myself somewhat saddened that we’ve lost an ambience that, perhaps more than anything else, characterized the industry of written word production.

###

From time to time, and with no particular thought to Mr. McMurtry’s enviable success, I’ve often thought about going back to using a typewriter, but I seriously doubt I could manage it. I still have the clunky old Royal I keep in my university office, mostly to amaze students who look upon it the way I might regard a genuine Model-T or an ashtray in a hotel restaurant. I tried to use it here awhile back, just for grins; but after years of word processing, my fingers are just too fast for it, and my “touch” isn’t nearly heavy enough anymore (although I tend to wear out a computer keyboard about every two months). My experiment was frustrating in other ways, as well. Having grown used to the automatic backspace-to-correct capability, I made far too many errors that required me to stop and erase. It was also uncommonly noisy. My office neighbor (age about 24) immediately came over to see what all the racket was.

At the same time, I have come recently to wonder what impact computer word processing has had on writing. There’s no question that processed writing is more attractive on the typed page, generally more correct, grammatically, and the variety of available fonts is also appealing. But I do believe that compositional quality has suffered. For one thing, it’s become much more homogenized, to a certain extent, less inspired. There’s a tendency for common expressions to be included more readily and for other, unique forms of utterance to disappear. There’s no question that word processing is less labor intensive than typewriting; and most professional writers and reviewers would aver that throughout the publishing industry, line and copyediting has become less attentive, as much of an editor’s work is obviated by spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and the ability to run global search/replace commands to ensure consistency of usage.

Still, there’s a psychology about the process that wants consideration. Prior to the word processor, when one sat down to type something—whether it was being composed on the machine or typed from handwritten copy—one tended to be very careful, not only about typos and mistakes in spelling and grammar, but also about content. If one typed out something at length and discovered that he was on the wrong track or had overlooked a logical point, skipped a step in a chronology or stage of development in a cause-effect or spatial sequence, if he just changed his mind about the thesis or wording or anything, it would mean having to stop, back up, and start typing again from the point of the departure or error. It might mean having to retype the entire document. If this involved making carbon copies, it could be an expensive and time-consuming chore. I think this process caused a writer of anything—journalism, scholarship, technical data, and especially fiction or poetry—to be much more circumspect when sitting down to type up the final copy. The process almost demanded a good deal of prewriting activity—carefully considered and well-organized outlines, scenarios, and preliminary drafts—before starting the laborious process of typewriting it for publication.

Today, of course, a couple of keystrokes is all that’s required to excise anything that’s wrong or headed off on a tangent. Material can be added or expanded at will. It can be cut out, saved, inserted elsewhere, or totally reversed in order, reorganized; paragraphs or even whole chapters can be rearranged in a matter of minutes, and one can do side-by-side comparisons of several different versions without having to commit any of them to paper.

From one point of view, this might mean that the end product would be superior, better wrought, more polished. From another, though, it might mean that a great deal of what’s coming out of the printer (or being posted directly onto the web) has not been subjected to much pre-thought, pre-writing at all, that it’s effectively off of the top of somebody’s head, that it’s undergone no mental gestation period so it might develop and grow, or even be aborted when some calamitous deformity was revealed in a colder, clearer, light of intellectual hindsight.

In the old days, of course, any written project generally went through at least two and usually three typed drafts: rough draft, fair copy, and final copy. Sometimes, only the last of these would be typewritten. At each stage, the writer had a chance to proofread, self-edit, consider, and make changes. Huge amounts of time were involved. Now, though, all that’s done on-screen, and editing is usually carried on while the composition of the rough draft is still ongoing.

###

No one, not even Mr. McMurtry, would disagree that word processing is cheaper, easier and quicker than typewriting. But that’s true of many activities in life, and the result isn’t always positive. Many items we use and rely on daily are not as durable or useful as they were before technological development and modern materials were applied to their production and manufacture. Many things are safer, perhaps, lighter, easier to use, less expensive and more disposable; but in some cases, those qualities have limited the appeal and even the utility of any number of products. I can think of a dozen household items ranging from tools to appliances that now have lightweight, user-friendly, ultra-safe plastic parts where metal or wood used to be the norm. The difference is that now, if some tiny little plastic part breaks, the whole thing is useless; before, I could sometimes go out to my garage and fashion a replacement out of a spare bolt, a coat hanger, bailing wire, scrap of wood, a dowel, or some other piece of workshop detritus, then solder or screw it on, and it would be as good as new, or at least still serviceable. Have you ever gotten water in your car’s electronic distributor? Used to be, a screwdriver, a dry shirt tail, and a folded dollar bill to re-gap the points was all that was needed to put you back in business. Today, it takes a tow truck and a hefty charge for a new part. Will word processing ultimately result in writing that is as disposable and unmemorable as a razor, camera, or coffee maker, or even a personal computer?

In my observation of student writing, I can say with certainty—and with a hearty seconding from most of my colleagues in the academy—that the general quality of written academic work has declined precipitously over the past two decades. The deterioration is not so much in grammar, spelling, and form (those have actually improved, to some extent, at least in terms of the old “careless” error), but rather in personal expression and a sense of individual creativity and uniqueness of utterance. I find that the most common errors are dictional redundancy, dropped words, use of the wrong word, misplaced modification, and a tendency toward jargon and colloquialism and similar mistakes that used to go under the heading of “style.” The problems are mostly elementary and easy to catch, but I’ve discovered that if I ask a student, “Did you proofread this in hard copy?”, the answer is invariably an admonishing scowl and a perplexed shake of the head that I should even suggest such an arcane exercise.

Over the past decade of teaching writing courses, I can testify that fewer than a dozen pieces of writing have been turned in with hand-applied proofreading marks of correction on them in spite of my suggestions to do so. Students, for some reason, find it heretical to deface a printed, word-processed paper by correcting an error by hand. It’s as if the printed page has become sacrosanct, an artifact by virtue of its having been generated by a computer peripheral. No matter how likely it is that a paper might not be perfect, students are loathe to read their final copy with a correcting pencil in hand, a dictionary or grammar handbook at their side, an eye for error on the page. They have, they often aver, read it “on-screen” over and over. How could they miss anything their grammar and spell checkers didn’t catch?

More than checking for errors, though, they also are unconcerned about the possibility that they might be able to improve on the overall quality of what they’ve written. Rhetorical effectiveness, even eloquence is no longer a consideration. It’s as if the physical appearance of the words is sufficient to “sell” their arguments and ideas, and they are reluctant to make a change once they’ve been committed to the printer’s buffer. Sometimes, things don’t even go that far; increasingly, professors are accepting work in “electronic format,” essentially e-mail attachments or postings on central websites, and the writing is never put on paper at all. It’s actually possible in some schools for students to pass through an entire course of study without ever submitting hard copy of anything. Professorial corrections and comments are offered through on-line editing commands.

I can recall being astonished at a professional meeting I attended about fifteen years ago when a paper’s presenter declared, and with some pride, that she had never seen the paper she was about to read in hard copy. At a conference I attended last year, two people delivered their papers by reading them directly from a laptop screen. They had never been printed out at all. (This gives rise to the question of why we all flew thousands of miles and paid hundreds of dollars to gather in a single place to hear the paper read aloud and badly, when it could have been transmitted via email far more efficiently. But that’s another issue.) In both cases, though, I heard mistakes as the readers orally plowed through their prose, careless wording and errors in organizational logic, and just plain dull prose. Of course, similar problems might have existed had they been reading from hard copy, but, I suspect, at least some of them would have been corrected had they printed up a copy and proofed it in advance.

From my own writing activity, I am convinced that no one can accurately proofread on-screen. I have no convincing conjecture as to why this may be. Possibly, it’s because one can only see one section of one page at a time, that part of one’s mind is occupied with manipulating the mouse or keyboard, or it may be because there’s some kind of intellectual or psychological detachment that occurs between words written on a screen and the eye. I do think that there is more of a tendency to skim-read on a screen than in hard copy; but that’s only a conjecture. I do know that much as I write—and I write for publication almost every day—I can read a document a dozen times on screen, then run up a hard copy, and still find numerous mistakes and errors in it that, somehow, escaped my notice. Inadvertent rhyme, incomplete sentences, unconscious repetition of words or even whole phrases and clauses that were invisible before suddenly appear obvious. I’ve heard the same confession from enough other professional writers to believe that this is a fairly common phenomenon. The number of mistakes one finds in a daily newspaper, where, today, almost nothing goes to hard copy before press, is also testimony to the existence of the problem.

I also find that I have a kind of emotional disconnection to stuff I read on screen as opposed to material on the printed page. This most especially applies to fiction and poetry, but it also is true with regard to hard news and academic essay. This may be a personal quirk; I can’t say that everyone—or even anyone—else reacts that way. But I do know that I react that way, much as I try not to. If it’s a shared phenomenon, then it raises the question of whether the same obstacle might not exist in the composition process. If it does, then what does that bode for the ultimate aesthetic of written documents? More to the scholarly point, what does it mean when there is no hard copy at all, no drafts and proto-versions of books and plays and poems? How can we study the evolution of belles lettres if no one runs up preliminary versions for consideration and editing, but merely deletes all but the final draft. What if there is no preliminary draft, because the writer makes changes as the document is being composed? Is this the end of philology?

Of course, that’s another issue, too. But aligned to it is yet another: the question of what has been lost in the way of archives of another sort—personal letters (now all email), notes, doodlings, idle ramblings, to say nothing of journals and diaries, that now are only composed in ephemeral, electronic formats and can be deleted or rendered irretrievable because of outmoded media. What will biographers and historians of the future have to work with?

###

If one could figure out how to structure some kind of experiment, I think some interesting conclusions would come from a comparison of the processes of composition. It would be problematic, of course. Merely finding a large enough control group who composed in longhand or who knew how to use a mechanical or even an electric typewriter at a competent level would be challenge enough. Still, it might be enlightening as to our overall shift into electronic expression as a way of life. The move into electronic composition is inevitable, and I certainly would advance no hope of stopping it or slowing it, even if I wanted to, which I don’t—necessarily. But I do think it’s important to understand what impact it may have on modes of written expression and on the impact of verbal communication through the composed word. If we have a notion of what’s going on in terms of electronic transmission and receipt of information from one mind to another, both rhetorically and substantively, we might be able to do it better, or at least more effectively.

Overall, though, I would say that the impact of the PC on writing—all writing, not just formal composition, but also in terms of email, internet postings, blogging, etc.—has been probably the most profound change in human expression since Guttenberg rolled off the first sheet of printed matter. I can remember back in the late seventies when I was told that it was “impossible” to demand that every student type his term research paper, since not all students owned typewriters or even knew how to use them. Today, I’d say more students can use a keyboard than can drive an automobile. At least, more can use one well than can drive well. But apart from student impact, there’s another factor. The raw amount of speculative writing being submitted for potential publication is today many, many times greater than it was twenty years ago. I have no idea how much larger it is, but more than a decade ago publishers made the move away from accepting un-agented submissions, not because they got more persnickety, but because the proliferation of the personal computer made it possible for people who would never have begun the labor of typewriting a complete manuscript before to believe that the keyboard on their desk virtually licenses them to be professional writers. The result has been a literary tidal wave of submissions, far too much for even the largest of publishing houses to sort through, let alone read and consider.

In a way, and to stay with my automotive analogy, the personal computer and word processing have done the same thing for writing (or to writing) that the automatic transmission did for motorists. That technological innovation made it possible for even the least capable, most inept, clumsy and uncoordinated individual to pilot a powerful and high-speed vehicle down a street or highway without having to shift gears or operate a clutch. The result, of course, is that driving a personal automobile became a right, not a privilege, to say nothing of a massive problem with individual transportation and energy-dependency that may well ruin us. One has to figure that when a trip to visit grandma in a neighboring state involved a long and involved bus or rail trip, replete with careful packing, intricate scheduling, changes at strange depots or stations in the middle of the night, such excursions were more carefully planned. Even when they meant having to crank up the family jitney, pack a hamper full of food, then fight bad roads, uncertain weather, and sparse repair shops, the journey was better thought out than today when it only means tossing the kids into the back of the minivan, popping a movie into the DVD, cranking up the CD player, adjusting the climate control, positioning the cell phone, and allowing the vehicle’s computer guidance system to keep a driver on the best and safest route, provide directions to the nearest family restaurant, or, if one is needed, to summon a mechanic.

In “the old days,” the question, I suppose, came down to whether the journey would be worth the effort. The question that word processing as opposed to more antique methods of composition and writing comes down to whether the ease and convenience the personal computer offers has improved or denigrated the final written product. Is there, in sum, a quid pro quo? The answer, however, may only make a moot point. Clearly, word processing is here to stay, and it will become even more technically proficient and easier to use in time. Ultimately, the old caveat about all computerized data processing—“garbage in, garbage out”—will doubtlessly prevail. But the process of production, the act of heuristically created writing is at the center of the issue, and whether we, as a literary culture, are losing more than we’re gaining may not be fully understood until it’s too late to arrest the impact.

LOVE AND A BRIGHT MORNING

“The past is always edited by memory”

—Jim W. Corder

In spite of the archetypal analogue, the words, “We’re going over to Eldorado,” always sent a shaft of dread into my pre-adolescent heart. They meant that my kid brother and I were in for an afternoon and most of an evening’s misery. Not only were we going to be bored beyond youthful distraction, but we also were going to have to spend time in Oklahoma visiting my mother’s great aunt. To my young mind, going to Oklahoma was a lot like going to Hell. I had not read Dante or Milton then, knew nothing of the fall of angels or lakes of fire. But we were hard-shell Baptists, and I had a pretty good notion of what Hell was like. I mean, hell, we heard about it for a solid hour every Sunday morning, which was kind of a Hell all by itself. But insofar as I was concerned, Hell—even Baptist Hell—had nothing on Eldorado, Oklahoma.

The trip over the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River took less than thirty minutes, but in those days—especially those summer days in our un-air-conditioned Ford—it seemed to last an eternity. The only landmark of interest was “Trash Hill,” a collection of ramshackle beer joints perched uncertainly on the Oklahoma side of the river where thirsty Texans from dry counties could wet their collective whistles in one of the derelict buildings. Mountains of cans cascaded from the shacks’ back doors down to the red sand dunes of the river’s perpetually dry bed, and I always looked for drunks stumbling around as we passed, a sight my mother swore she had seen a hundred times before.

I never saw any drunks, but Trash Hill and its neon beer signs welcomed us to Oklahoma, which my father was fond of pointing out, “was just OK.” From there on into the state, there was nothing but narrow, cracked highways, weed-choked bar-ditches, and salt-sandy fields of cotton and wheat. Even by the standards of West Texas, Oklahoma was poor; there, the Great Depression never really ended. The state bird was a pest, the state flower a parasite. I learned to hate Oklahoma early in life. The only other point of interest on the trip was a small, picket-fenced gravesite, a baby’s grave, I was told. Years before when there were no towns, a baby died on a train trip; they just stopped and buried it right by the railbed. I imagined it would be my fate someday to be lain beside this nameless child’s grave, for I was sure I would die during one of my visits to Oklahoma.

Once we arrived in Eldorado—pronounced El-Doe-Ray-Doe, a tiny place marked by a series of rusting grain elevators next to a crumbling depot—the ordeal began, and whether it lasted a few hours or all day, I never failed to be glad when it was over. Even though Eldorado was a mere twenty-some-odd miles from my home in Texas, it seemed to be another planet, another world. And it was. It was in Oklahoma. And it was totally dominated by my great-great-aunt Minnie.

Minnie Render was my mother’s father’s mother’s sister. By the time I came of sufficient age to recognize her, she was an old, old woman. Bent and with a hump, she was an elfin figure with snuff-stained gums, false teeth, and claw-like hands. Skin draped off her frail bones, and she never wore anything but loose-fitting dusters and terry cloth house shoes. She had a typical “old person” odor about her—that slightly medicinal smell of camphor combined with a certain sourness and stale mustiness—although my mother always remarked on how clean she kept herself, how proud of her she was, and how active she remained even into her eighties. She wore her iron-gray hair close-cropped, and the liver spots on her hands and wattles of her neck always made my skin tingle whenever she touched me.

And she loved to touch me.

She was always hugging and kissing me, looking into my face with her deep blue eyes, then smiling through those brown dentures and announcing that I was such a “pretty boy” that she was sure I would become President of the United States or whatever else I wanted to be. When she touched me, I cringed, especially when I saw the lone whisker trailing from her sunken cheek and the deep folds of useless skin hanging from her body. I fled outdoors as soon as I could and occupied myself exploring the sheds that stood idly behind her house, wondering what it was like down in the abandoned storm cellar, and explaining to my kid brother about the mysterious mound of earth my father had assured me used to be the “outside Johnnie” before the days of indoor plumbing. Neither of us could imagine such a thing.

Minnie Althea Annis came to Oklahoma from Butler County, Kentucky, in 1906 to marry a widower named Cleatus Josh Render, a farmer and businessman, but whether the marriage took place in Kentucky or Oklahoma I never knew. I did know that he ultimately died in an influenza epidemic and was buried at the Eldorado cemetery in one of those plots surrounded by an elaborate wrought-iron fence. I also knew that they had no children together, but he had children by a previous marriage. By the time I came along, they were old enough to be my grandparents. One, Cortez, visited once, but I don’t recollect meeting him.

Aunt Minnie knew children, understood them, loved them. The family saying was that she reared nineteen youngsters, although she never bore one of her own. One of those she reared was my grandfather, and eight of them were my mother and her siblings. My grandfather, Glen X. Faught (The X stood for nothing; it was a suggestion made by Aunt Minnie, who thought it sounded pretty) also came to Oklahoma from Kentucky to live with her as soon as he was old enough to make the trip. He was apparently something of a romantic dreamer whose main ambition in life was to own his own café. The only photograph I’ve ever seen of him shows a giant of a man standing beside a cotton wagon. He is wearing bib overalls and a big straw hat. Children surround him, tiny in his shadow. He was farming then, something that soon busted him, just as the restaurant business would bankrupt him once or twice, as well.

Eventually, his life took a path that would lead him to marry Bonnie Summar, a young, black-haired beauty, pretty enough to have been a Gibson Girl. She and her twin sister came with their widowed father, a druggist, to Eldorado, from Wise County, Texas. I suspect, though, the courtship and marriage was born of the same impulse that prompted him to try again and again to make his fortune, to borrow money from Aunt Minnie and anyone else who would finance his dreams. Once he went to Yseleta, a small town near El Paso, and set up his café on money Aunt Minnie provided. He lost it all. He came home and couldn’t even raise enough to go back and sell the ovens and cookware and other things he left behind.

In 1933, my grandmother died of uremic poisoning brought on by a fall during a late-term pregnancy, her tenth. One Christmas Eve a few years later, my grandfather came to tuck in my mother. He had brought her a piece of pie crust to sample, but keeled over her bed and was gone. Aunt Minnie never fully recovered from the loss, and his heart attack ruined my mother’s Christmas spirit forevermore.

Aunt Minnie took over rearing his children. It was a familiar chore: Her parents died when she was eight and she reared her brothers and sisters; she then reared her sister’s family; now she would rear her dead nephew’s boys and girls. The family legend also maintained that she and Josh were once people of property. Certainly, Josh’s brother, Doc, was a man of some wealth. They had come to Indian Territory early to homestead, and they’d made something of a go of it. The family held land, owned businesses and buildings, owned an automobile in a place where the chief means of transportation was a mule-drawn wagon, had money in the bank and nice homes to live in. I never heard anyone say that my grandfather frittered all the money away, but the implication was always there that a combination of his overly ambitious schemes and the depression took everything Aunt Minnie had. The implication also was that she was always happy to give it until it ran out.

Aunt Minnie supported the orphaned family by taking in washing and ironing, by mending and sewing for those who were better off, by taking in boarders. The family kept chickens and other livestock, and there was always plenty to eat. But there were times when there was no money for shoes or clothes. Once, the family lived in freezing, month-to-month terror that the general store would repossess the only stove in the house because of the lack of a two-dollar-a-month installment. My mother’s earliest memories of Aunt Minnie are of her standing on swollen ankles while she applied stove-heated flatirons to wealthy people’s clothing. The children hoed cotton in the spring and summer, pulled bolls in the fall. She sent them to school and church, kept their clothes clean, mended. She refused to allow them to feel the humility of their humble state, and preached daily that pride and decency grew out of faith and positive thinking.

These were the days of the “Dust Bowl,” hard times in a hard land, but Aunt Minnie was a hard woman, and she proved that love and work and nourishing food will keep people alive and well when money wasn’t even so much as a dream. Her penchant for quoting just the right Scripture was unfailingly applied to correct any mischief, inspire any hope, ward off any sense of despair.

The family home in Eldorado was very old, even then. Originally built as a farmhouse, it was what today is called “prairie style.” It was constructed without kitchen or bathroom. Josh had it moved into town for his bride and placed on a boulevard that once was tree-lined and graced by a fine, wide sidewalk. The elms were dying even in my youth, though; the sidewalk had buckled and cracked and was home to a million insects, the most sinister of which was the centipede, whose sting could kill, we believed. There was running water in the house, but Aunt Minnie never trusted it. She relied more on her cistern and a hand-pump—which, owing to an oddity of remodeling, were actually inside the house. There was a cold cellar there since the family could never afford ice for their icebox. She cooked on a primitive range in the tiny tip-out kitchen, crudely stuck onto it later. Electricity was also a late addition.

The front of the house was surrounded by a low, uneven, peeling veranda supported by rotting white columns and encircling a double-doored, multi-windowed enclosure known as the “South Bedroom.” There, countless male borders had resided, but none stayed for long. I only remember meeting one or two. Aunt Minnie tolerated no whiskey drinking or card throwing, so when these temporary residents were caught doing such—or worse, I suspect—they were invited to leave. The room eventually became a dusty storage chamber I don’t recall ever entering, but I did spend time looking at the trunks and cases that surrounded a heavy, counterpane-covered bed.

The rest of the house was in similar dusty disuse by the time I was nine or ten. Although she was still active, cooked her own meals, cleaned her own rooms, there were limits to what she could do. The two other bedrooms were crowded with four-poster beds, armoires, trunks, and overstuffed furniture of another era. The living room had the only carpet, but ancient red-and-white linoleum covered the bathroom and kitchen, and plaid oil cloth-covered tables had made heavy indentions in its pattern. Worn, irregular hardwood floors ran throughout, and there was an ancient hand-crank telephone that stood sentinel outside the bathroom. Faded, flowery wallpaper draped down from leak-stained twelve-foot ceilings, most of which supported a single light bulb.

Aunt Minnie lived in another addition to the main structure, a rectangular sleeping porch, now enclosed but still leaky where it was crudely attached to the house next to the add-on bathroom. It had its own entrance—her “front door”, as it was the only door visitors, including us, ever used—and the only one with a window-unit air conditioner. There were two beds, one huge white-painted metal stead with high thick feather mattresses for Aunt Minnie, and a smaller, firmer, single bed in the opposite corner for Mrs. Goolsby, the woman who was hired to live with her. There were several chairs, but I never saw Aunt Minnie use one. She was no invalid but preferred the bed. She sat on it, lay on it, held court on it. Mrs. Goolsby took the most comfortable chair, anyway.

My mother seemed to dislike Mrs. Goolsby, but I never could understand why. She always appeared agreeable to me. She usually left for a walk or to visit someone when we arrived, although I do remember a few occasions when my mother was nearly in angry tears on our return trip because the older woman wouldn’t absent herself so the family could talk privately. But Aunt Minnie always had a pleasant word about her paid companion, and the only complaint I ever heard her voice was when Mrs. Goolsby attached a multicolored plastic sheet to the black-and-white TV screen, something poor folks were trying when color TV first appeared. It made the shows impossible for my aunt to watch, and it was awkward asking Mrs. Goolsby to remove the offending piece of red, green, and blue polyethylene, which she ordered from some catalogue. My father finally solved the problem simply by taking it off in Mrs. Goolsby’s absence and cutting it in small pieces. If she noticed its removal, she never said anything to us.

While my parents spent time in that small room, I often grew tired of exploring the area around the house. Sometimes my brother and I would visit Streety—Mrs. Streetman—who lived in a front room of her equally ancient house next door. She kept three pug dogs with her at all times, and the room reeked like a kennel. She also kept a space heater lit year round, even on the hottest days. But she served delicious cookies and milk, and I was always intrigued because some of the neighboring children said she was a witch.

The truth, I think, was that she was a folk doctor. In the days when medical men were scarce, Streety’s cures and potions were much in demand. I believe she was also a midwife. Neither my mother or her siblings were born in a hospital, and home births were rarely attended by a physician. To my knowledge, Streety never delivered any one of my family, although she was on hand for my grandmother’s death and may well have delivered her stillborn infant. There was an aura of mystery about Streety, something a little scary. Yet I liked visiting her, and it wasn’t until she grew too old to clean sufficiently to keep the dogs’ stink at bay that I ceased spending time there.

If my parents were in a generous mood, I was sometimes given a quarter or fifty cents to take “downtown,” a two-block long strip of crumbling fieldstone and adobe-brick buildings. There was a drug and dime store among other dying businesses situated a bare three blocks from Aunt Minnie’s house. The walk was intriguing, since we could watch red ants making their beds in the cracked sidewalks and since the town was so small that we were allowed to roam freely. Once there, my kid brother and I could sip ice cream sodas made up by pharmacist Bill Hutchinson, a childhood friend of my mother’s and trusted medical minister to my aunt in doctorless Eldorado. We would wander the dusty sundries counter and try to figure out how to stretch our change into some toy or other. The store had a special significance to me. I’d always heard the story that my mother was in the corner telephone booth one night when the sheriff confronted a suspect there. She was on the phone at the moment the criminal pulled a gun and shot the sheriff’s ear off. I never learned if the sheriff shot back.

There was The Courier newspaper office where one of my mother’s brothers had worked, and an abandoned picture show—the Bijou—the deserted Beach Hotel, which Aunt Minnie and my grandfather once managed—another failed venture—the summer before he married. There was a hardware store and one of the last “mom and pop” groceries that still delivered goods in boxes. The grocery smelled different from stores I knew back in Texas. It was always alive with rich aromas of fruits, vegetables, grains, and fresh cuts of meat in an antique glass-fronted cooler. I was always fascinated by the sight of Mr. Foley in his blood-splattered apron, moving around his huge butcher block and handling gleaming cleavers and large knives.

Trips downtown were not that frequent, though. Mostly during those visits, my brother and I just sat around on the veranda on rusting porch furniture, wished for our bicycles, and waited impatiently to go home. We sometimes explored the cotton fields behind the house, searched for snakes and horned toads, or chased Streety’s chickens. Principally, we just wandered around in the heat and prayed for departure. To go inside was to be kissed and fondled and yelled at for leaving the door open and letting the air conditioning out. I learned early that cool air was nothing to be wasted in Oklahoma.

If the visit stretched beyond sundown and it was summer, we could beg a Mason jar and collect lightning bugs; later, I discovered children living down the street in a genuine apartment house—one of those old, three-story frame structures with gables and a towering roof, where ten or a dozen families lived. That was a wonder to me, because except for Lucy and Desi, no respectable person I’d ever heard of lived in an apartment. We made friends with some of the neighborhood kids, played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can in the Oklahoma twilight, and we would stare through patched screens into houses and wonder about people’s doings. Homes in Eldorado seemed old, with high roofs, big porches, large sash windows and rusty, fly-specked screens; almost all were lighted inside by single, naked bulbs suspended from the center of their ceilings. Now, whenever I see such a thing, I always think of Eldorado.

In time, we could hear radio—and later TV—programs through the open windows, see people reclining on sofas and heavy chairs, and occasionally families would come outside and sit on their porches in the evening’s cool. Those were the most tolerable visits, although they were poor substitutes for what I imagined myself doing back home in Texas, where everyone I knew had air conditioning.

Winter visits, however, were another matter. Housebound by sleet or chilling rain or snow, my kid brother and I played through our limit of mutual endurance in about ten minutes; we were soon squabbling, something that drove my father to madness, my mother to uncharacteristic anger, and Aunt Minnie to heights of compassion and amused understanding that frustrated them both. One cold night when Mrs. Goolsby had gone into the hospital and we slept over, my brother and I bathed in a rust-lined, claw-footed tub, then shared Mrs. Goolsby’s narrow bed. I remember listening to a wind-up alarm ticking loudly in my ear all night while I stared through the dusty screen at a stark street lamp filtering down through the chinaberry tree next to the house. The smells of the room seemed to lie on me like a blanket; and the sheets, though clean, were heavily starched; they kept me itching and thrashing around until dawn.

Except for one Christmas Eve when I received a stocking filled with fruit, nuts, and hard candy—a complete reversal of my usual anticipations which would be fulfilled by Santa Claus in my own Texas home the next morning—I don’t recall ever enjoying myself “over to Eldorado.” At best, I endured, as I had no choice. Even that one visit did little more than convince me that Oklahomans were naturally fated to be deprived of the better things in life; I fervently hoped that they would never come to Texas and bring their meager expectations with them. I longed to leave from the moment we arrived, lived for the moment when my father would announce, “Well, it’s time to pull up our britches and go home,” an expression that never failed to draw a frown from my mother. I never felt completely relaxed until I peered over the front seat of our old Ford and saw the beer-can-lined bridge back across the Red River and the familiar broken granite monument that announced we were, as my father was fond of saying, “back in the United States.”

As I grew older, I came to accept the trips to Eldorado as an unavoidable misery, even so. My mother’s ongoing lectures on her great aunt’s virtues were discomforting and somewhat boring, and they made me feel guilty for at least not liking the old lady a little bit. After all, she always provisioned me and my brother with generous supplies of Dr. Pepper and cookies. But her words finally began to penetrate my hostility and to soothe me with a jealously guarded notion that I was related to this remarkable woman. This idea was reinforced by our visit to Bowling Green, Kentucky. There, I discovered I was related to almost everyone we met, and all the relations were through Aunt Minnie. I also found that, to their way of thinking, she was nothing less than divine.

“You’re Aunt Minnie’s great-grandnephew,” some uncle or cousin would exclaim. “She’s an angel, an absolute angel.” It gave me a sense of special importance, a kind of warm glow of propriety, but it didn’t carry well back to Oklahoma.

My mother’s claim that “everyone in Eldorado knows Aunt Minnie, calls her Aunt (pronounced ain’t) Minnie,” didn’t stand up very well when I grew enough to realize how very small and unimportant Eldorado was. It wasn’t even the county seat, and the depot—a standard measure of comparison for any son of a railroad man—was pitifully tiny. Still, her stories of Aunt Minnie’s former wealth and familial sacrifices also seemed too incredible to swallow—even in light of her Kentucky fame—at least for the cynicism of adolescence that was already developing inside me. I immediately discounted them against the isolation and civic misery that was Eldorado and its hapless residents. The choice of angels, I thought, might be to serve in Heaven, but my aunt had elected to rule in Hell. One Sunday afternoon, though, I received an education in my mother’s veracity.

It was raining and cold, and as always during inclement weather, my brother and I were installed on the edge of Mrs. Goolsby’s bed where we were expected to stay quiet and keep our feet off the covers for the duration of the visit. After what felt like several hours, the ancient phone jangled twice, and I leaped up. I had wanted to talk on that telephone forever, and here was my chance. My mother allowed me to answer it, but all I was able to do was pick up the earpiece, say “Hello” and then pass it to her. Her face blanched as she listened, nodded, and said, “In a few minutes, then. Of course.”

I was shooed away, and my mother dramatically began wailing that a certain woman was coming by. She kept fluffing at her hair and tugging on her dress, and my father was brushing at his trousers and straightening his clothes. As he pulled a comb from his pocket and began to work painfully on my brother’s hair, I noticed that Aunt Minnie was utterly unperturbed. If anything, she was beaming. My mother was out of the room now, lighting the space heater in the living room, pulling out dusting cloths and running them over the furniture. My father was dispatched to make coffee and to see if any sweets could be found.

Their panic trebled in a few moments when a knock came at my aunt’s bedroom door, and an old black woman appeared with several jars of preserves she had brought as a present. My aunt greeted her, invited her to sit down in one of the chairs, and they chatted pleasantly while my mother fretted and peered out into the rain with a nervous, tortured expression on her face. No amount of hinting could move the elderly visitor to leave. My mother’s increasingly tactless suggestions were derailed by my aunt, who insisted the old woman stay and visit “for a spell” and asked if the coffee was ready.

In a few minutes, a large, black Cadillac pulled up in front of the dying elms, and a chauffeur emerged to hold an umbrella over the head of a young woman who stepped out and walked deliberately past the front entrance of the house and around to the door of my aunt’s bedroom, as if she’d done it a thousand times. When she was admitted, she spoke to my mother briefly, nodded toward my father who shook her gloved hand, and then stepped up to Aunt Minnie’s bed.

Aunt Minnie, propped up on her pillows as always, smiled in greeting. She introduced her to the other woman as if they were old acquaintances. The old woman nodded, smiled, and kept her chair. My aunt wore one of her usual dusters—a faded blue print that barely concealed her emaciated chest. She had coated her gums with snuff only moments before, so she spat discreetly into a glass kept on her nightstand, and then reached out and hugged the new visitor.

The woman was very pretty. She was wearing high heels and seamed stockings under a blue suit wrapped in a fur cape. She wore a small hat and veil, and when she removed her blue leather gloves, bright gems ringed her fingers. A gold bracelet encircled her right wrist, and a diamond studded watch matched it on her left. She wore lots of makeup and her perfume was pleasant and drove away all the other odors in the room. She looked like a fashion model or a television star, and my brother and I stood in silent awe. But I could sense my mother’s agony.

My father offered a chair, but she shook her head and sat on the bed next to my aunt, who held her hands and laughed and talked with her two guests. While my mother served coffee and stale Fig Newtons, the only pastry available, and my father escaped to pace the hallway and smoke, my brother and I were banished to the living room where we squatted by the sputtering space heater and tried to stay warm. I spied on the chauffeur. He stood shivering on the porch until my mother came out and brought him a steaming cup, for which he gave her a bright smile before resuming his watch.

The woman didn’t stay long, but her goodbye was full of sadness. When she left dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief, I heard her say to my mother, “I thought I’d never see her again.”

“Who was that?” I asked my father when the chauffeured Caddy drove away, but it was my mother who answered as we stood on the frigid, gray boards of the veranda and watched them leave.

“That was the governor’s daughter,” she said. “The daughter of the governor of Oklahoma. She was passing through and wanted to stop and see Aunt Minnie.”

“Why?” I asked. “Did she know her?”

My mother smiled. “She practically raised her.”

Years later, I learned that Aunt Minnie “practically raised” dozens and dozens of children who went on to become special people. Her home was always open to any child. Presidents of universities, state senators, newspaper editors, and wealthy ranchers, farmers, and business people of every stripe had a special place in their childhood memories for this old woman who now seemed so frail and helpless. Some of them, of course, went on to become unremarkable folks, but all of them shared a loving memory of Aunt Minnie and swore that they were what they were and no worse because of her.

When they thought of it, they would stop by, and she treated each with the same familiar hospitality, same homespun grace, a cup of coffee and a cookie or two. Whether it was a poor farm laborer who had known her for years or the richest woman in the region, all were invited into the smelly old back bedroom to sit on the big mattresses next to my aunt, always without deference to their social status, wealth, color, or age. They would hold hands with her, watch her dip snuff and smile and listen to her tell them how pretty they were, how good God was to them, how proud she was to see them doing so well, how all they could ever hope for was good health, a clear mind, and a bright morning.

For some, I heard, she would break out a dusty bottle of Mogen David which she kept beneath the sink, but I never saw that happen.

Aunt Minnie was a pure democrat. She treated everyone the same: family or strangers, enemies and beloved friends. No one left her house wanting for food, love, or understanding. Although by the time I was born and long before, she had less in a year than most people throw away in a day, her generosity was unbridled. There was no hypocrisy in it, no seeking for self. She took people as she found them, discovered what good there might be in them, and loved them for it. She offered no apology, no rationalization, no excuses. In her mind, all were no more or less than what God gave them to be, and what more could anyone hope for? What she received in return was only their love and respect, but that was more than enough.

I didn’t love her, though. Not yet. It would take years for that emotion to come on me. I regarded her as an unnecessary and even painful duty in my life. Visits to her interrupted plans with my playmates, required me to bathe and put on good clothes, to ride in a hot car over to the dreaded state of Oklahoma only to stay clean, quiet, and out of trouble for endless hours of boredom while the visits went on and on. I endured her kisses, her platitudes, her patronizing compliments, her Bible quotes. I never saw how genuinely she meant all of it.

In my distant, youthful memories, I recall big dinners around the huge dining table. The sideboard was laden with roast turkey, baked chicken, or roast beef, cornbread dressing, candied yams, corn-on-the-cob, fresh green beans, garden okra, ripe tomatoes and cucumbers and gallons of cistern-water iced tea and coffee, which my parents, uncles, aunts and friends of the family consumed in hearty, old-fashioned holiday fashion. But those memories are dim.

My mother was the only one of her family to remain close enough to keep an eye on her. She had sisters in Mississippi, Alabama, and another who was married to a naval officer and who, in those years, was in Europe or on the East Coast much of the time. She had one brother who moved away to New Mexico to publish newspapers, and another brother who wandered around a lot, sometimes coming back to Eldorado when he was broke or in trouble, slowly drinking himself to death. None of the family ever rejected him or made him feel worse than he already did. Following Aunt Minnie’s lead, they could do nothing but love him.

In spite of my childhood feelings of parochial rights in and about the old house in Eldorado when cousins visited, there was no resentment about my family’s responsibilities to this widowed aunt who was mother to all. My mother accepted it as a part of what Aunt Minnie was, what she required. And much as she lamented the continuing decay of the old house and worried about Aunt Minnie’s declining health, as much as she deplored her eccentricities and fretted over her needs and wants, I never heard her complain. It wasn’t until she, herself, aged, that I saw the strength of character, the depthless love, the willingness to accept without complaint whatever life threw in her way that Aunt Minnie had inspired, inculcated, embedded in every child she touched. I also was ashamed, for in my rejection of Aunt Minnie’s love, I found too few of those qualities in myself.

When Aunt Minnie died, she had lived ninety-two years and one day. It was only the second time I remember seeing her outside that house, except perhaps leaning on her cane on the crumbling porch and watching us drive away. In more recent years, though, it was a rare thing to see her away from her own bed, although she continued to care for her house and gardened a bit, as she could.

Other than the night she died, the only time I recall seeing her away from her house was during a visit to our home in Texas. She seemed smaller than ever, more frail, more out-of-place. I remember being relieved when my parents drove her back to her house and bed-throne in Oklahoma. I had a feeling she might die if she was away for too long. In a way, she did.

The end came as it does for so many old people: she fell and broke frail bones. She had been out on the veranda doing something and missed one of the rotting boards—or it gave way—and she was rushed to the hospital in Quanah. I’m not sure what actually killed her: pneumonia, I think, but knowing her as I’ve come to, I suspect when she realized she would be helpless the rest of her life, she just decided it was time to go. She had always been too alive simply to lie down and quit. She’d spent too much of her life taking on the burdens of others to now become a burden to anyone. She could never live alone again. A nursing home was out of the question. I think she knew it was time to die.

I was taken to see her that last night in the hospital bed. As always, she seemed at peace with herself, and there was no question in anyone’s mind about her being at peace with God. Her mind was as sharp as ever, and she looked at me and told me once more how “pretty” I was, how I could become president “if I wanted to,” what a good boy I was, and how much she loved me. She said much the same to my kid brother, but he was so young, he wriggled away and didn’t stand for much of that. I envied him his youth. I had to stand and take it all. I moved off to one side while my mother and her old friend, Bill Hutchinson, hovered over the gray lump beneath the hospital bed. She had insisted on his presence there, for like everyone in Eldorado, he also was one of her children. She was confident that he, more than the hospital’s physicians and nurses, would know the best thing to do.

She asked for water, and they held a glass straw to her shrunken lips to suck, then she lay back, looking fragile and out of place.

“I think I left that back door unlatched,” she said to Bill. “Will you see about it?”

He nodded and said he would check it, then quickly turned away, wiping his eyes. I was sent from the room and my brother and I waited a few minutes in the hall until my mother came out. Bill had his arm around her; my father, helpless and a little afraid, I think, came to me and muttered as much to himself as to anyone. “Worrying about that back door. Last thing she said. Yesterday was her birthday. Ninety-two and a day.”

I didn’t attend Aunt Minnie’s funeral. We had buried my father’s father only a few months before, and I made up my mind that I had suffered enough funeral trauma for one childhood.

I heard, though, that all of Eldorado and much of Jackson County, Oklahoma, turned out for Aunt Minnie’s send-off. People came from all over, not only Tulsa and Oklahoma City, but from out-of-state as well. Few were actually related to her, but most were still her family. The church was jammed with her children and their children and their children’s children, all of whose lives had been in some measure touched by Aunt Minnie. She didn’t rear all of them by any means, but she saw to it that they all knew where there was love, understanding, compassion to be had in a world that so often seemed harsh, unfair, and unforgiving. As I said, she knew children, and they knew her, or at least they came to know her when they had children of their own. When they thought of her, they remembered what it was like to be a child, to need to be loved and understood, and many of them, I think, found their own wells of love and understanding deepened and sweetened by the force of this old woman.

It’s been nearly fifty years, and I’ve only visited her grave once, right after she died. I’ve tried to do so again, but I’ve never been able to find it, or Josh’s, or my grandfather’s, or his son and namesake’s, a boyish man killed in an auto-train wreck before I was born. When I go back to Eldorado, though, I find that people still remember her. People the age of my children recognize her name. If I see someone on the street, I might introduce myself by name, or even establish my parents’ name, and that won’t do it. But if I say I was nephew to Aunt Minnie, their eyes light up.

“Aunt Minnie,” they’ll say. “She was a saint.”

I guess she was. “Reared nineteen children and never bore one of her own,” is the phrase that always comes to mind when I think of her. It’s the one old-timers in Eldorado will echo if anyone asks about her. I ache with regret when I think of all she could have told me that I was too young to ask. Born during Reconstruction when Ulysses S. Grant was president, when the Kiowa and Comanche still ruled the prairies of Oklahoma, she died a year before John F. Kennedy was killed, before the disillusionment of what it might mean to be a president. She saw the coming of the telephone, the automobile, electricity, the radio, the airplane, the motion picture, air conditioning and color television. She survived three major depressions and epidemics of typhoid, cholera, diphtheria and influenza; and nursed children through countless bouts of measles, mumps, pneumonia, and whooping cough. She lived through two world wars, numerous smaller ones, saw the rise and fall of nations, the coming and going of heroes and villains. She experienced comfortable prosperity and abject poverty, hard work and a good life, unconditional love and agonizing loss. It makes me wonder how strong a heart must be to keep from breaking.

I only saw one picture of her before she became very old. Taken on the veranda when it was newer and freshly painted, surrounded by pansies and other flowers, it shows a middle-aged woman who was never tall except in character: She stands erect in a black dress—the hump came later—with hair cropped short like a flapper, and one of those demur expressions so many women of the twenties wore when the Kodak was brought out for a too-warm, Sunday-after-church portrait. She looked happy there, smiling into the superheated atmosphere. I could almost imagine that beyond the door behind her, coffee was boiling, chicken and dressing was warming on the stove, and a tall chocolate cake awaited the removal of the first slice.

What must she have thought of my pulling away from her embraces, of my scowls in response to her kisses? How could I have hurt her so much? I feel real pain when I think of how much she loved me and how much I resented her touch, her nearness. Sometimes the innocence of childhood can be a curse, no matter what Wordsworth says. An aunt can be mother to us all.

In her obituary in the Eldorado Courier, an anonymous citizen of the town was quoted as saying, “If she doesn’t go to heaven, I don’t want to.” If she was not an angel, she was at least a good person, a woman of incredible strength, of infinite understanding, of endless toleration, of bottomless generosity. So much can be said about so few people. If she made sacrifices, it was out of love, never out of personal gain, and that can be said about almost no one. She never won a Nobel Prize, never went into the ghetto or refugee camps to care for those less fortunate than she. Instead, she made her home a haven for those in need of a different kind of succor, of a more abstract kind of support. She asked for nothing for herself but good health, a clear mind, and another bright morning. For ninety-two years and a day, she received all she asked for, and somehow, I believe, for her, it was enough.

ENVOY: WHY YOU PROBABLY WON’T MEET THE AUTHOR

“Publish and be damned.”

—Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (attributed)

Soon after my first novel was published, I showed up at a bookstore to do a signing, my first. I was excited! I envisioned lines of people eager to snap up copies of my brand new book. I’d seen this happen in films, after all! I knew how it worked. There would be decent wine, maybe some tasty hors d’oeuvres, perhaps a chord or two of classical music playing low in the background, well-dressed, adoring fans—none of whom had ever heard of me before this event—all brandishing gold cards, eager for an autograph on my newly published novel. I bought a black turtleneck and a tweed jacket just to wear for this marvelous “coming out.”

I arrived at the shop a good half-hour before I was scheduled, introduced myself to the clerk at the counter. She looked at me, annoyed, blinked twice, then turned toward the back of the store. “Hey, Maureen!” she yelled. “Some guy’s out here says he supposed to sign some books. You know anything about it?”

Things went downhill from there.

Maureen, a harried assistant manager appeared at last, saying she hadn’t been “warned” of my appearance. She was only marginally embarrassed; actually, she was quite put-out that I was standing there, tweed and turtleneck in evidence, waiting for her attention. She hurriedly set up a card table just behind a huge display for a new best-selling thriller, found a chair for me, then placed a small pile of my freshly unpacked books (still shrink-wrapped) in front of me. “I wondered why these came in,” she said. “I sure didn’t order them.” She dispatched the register clerk to hoof it down the mall to Walgreen’s for some “refreshments.” She returned momentarily with a package of Oreos, which she ripped open and put on the table’s corner. “Looks like you’re all set,” Maureen declared, then she disappeared into the bowels of the store’s back rooms. I didn’t see her again.

For the next four hours I watched people slink by and avoid eye contact with the odd-looking, bearded fellow in the black turtleneck. I sold two books—the clerk bought one, and a distant cousin of mine dropped by for the other. My mother wrote to tell her where I’d be.

This was one of my better outings.

###

I have since learned that such experiences are not rare. They are fairly typical of the way most writers are treated when they show up for what publishers’ publicists euphemistically call an “in-store event.” The humiliation can be devastating unless one has thick skin and a great sense of irony.

Such events may be arranged by the publishers themselves in cooperation with the bookstore or bookstore chains, or they may be arranged directly by the author and the “community relations coordinator” (CRC), or in the case of some independent bookstores, directly with the store’s manager. In each case, the arrangements are up to the local store’s personnel, and often, so is any advance publicity or advertising to entice people to come by and buy a book.

For some writers, a bit more effort may be made. Publishing houses can work with bookstores or even with whole chains to arrange special—even gala—signing events. Sometimes, managers receive elaborate and handsome publicity packets, poster-sized blowups of dust jackets, even camera-ready advertising copy for use in newspapers and newsletters. Generally, though, if the bookstore itself has to pay for such publicity, and unless an agreement for “cooperative advertising” had been worked out between the store and the publisher, very little in the way of pre-event publicity will be staged. I probably was lucky that the store didn’t charge me for the Oreos.

The primary value of public signings seems to be to build goodwill between the publisher and the bookstores. In the case of the large chain stores, the store managers are usually mandated by their corporate headquarters to hold so many such affairs. Sometimes, several per week. But neither they nor the publisher provides booze, attractive food, nor much advance publicity except, maybe a hastily scrawled or computer-generated sign advertising the event, or some generally ignored in-store handbills stuffed into the sacks with purchases and receipts.

Unless cooperative advertising has been worked out between the publisher and the bookstores, even the megachains rely on direct mail newsletters or they count on free announcements on “Community Bulletin Boards” and “What’s Happening” newspaper columns to stimulate interest. Some stores put up placards on an easel somewhere in the store a few days before the author arrives. Such efforts are unreliable at best, generally useless at worst. I’ve signed books immediately behind such a poster-sized advertisement containing my photo and name, only to have people stop, stare at it, then at me and ask, “Who are you?”

Not surprisingly, bookstore signings often fail to do more than embarrass everyone concerned, including the potential customer.

###

Over the years, when I’ve healed from the mortification from my last outing and agreed to do another signing to promote a new title, I’ve often arrived and been carefully positioned somewhere between “Field Guides” and “Coin Collecting.” There I sit, isolated, waiting patiently for some literate soul to come by in search of a novel to read. I usually can observe the fiction section on the other side of the store where people are browsing the shelves, happily unaware of my presence.

Why managers imagine that someone wanting an art book or a guide to better health through yoga might casually pick up a novel just because they spotted a writer squatting in that section to sign books is beyond me. Why they think people would instinctively know that situated next to auto repair manuals and research tools, a novelist might be hawking his own books is also a mystery. But such is the ordinary situation. I’ve sometimes found myself wedged in-between the music or video aisles, near volumes on gardening and airplanes, once even trying to sell my adult novel, replete as it was with sex and violence, in-between a display of Sesame Street and Dr. Seuss books. In one case, I was positioned directly in front of a life-size statue of Barney the Dinosaur.

There are other kinds of competition, as well. At a Barnes and Noble signing, I was feeling enthusiastic when I saw people lining up. Then, I saw a man dressed in a clown costume walk in. He led the crowd, Pied Piper-like, back to the children’s section where he performed juggling tricks and sold copies of a prekindergarten video-book combination while the toddlers’ parents cast suspicious looks in my direction.

The most common experience is boredom. One autumn, I drove nearly a hundred miles for an event at a chain bookstore. I was assured by the CRC that “massive publicity” had generated “tremendous enthusiasm” for my appearance. It was a Monday night, and the Dallas Cowboys were playing on network television. The detonation of a nuclear device in that store would have harmed no customer.

After about half an hour of watching the two football-deprived employees chat distractedly at the register, I was approached by the assistant manager, who timidly asked me if I would mind watching the front. There was a television in the back office, and he and his two co-workers wanted to go catch the second half. He apologized, “We don’t ever get much business when ‘The Boys’ are playing. You can just call me if anybody comes in and wants to buy something.” Apart from one extremely inebriated homeless person wanting to know where the toilet was, no one did.

No matter how much enthusiasm may be perceived in advance by any store official, veteran authors soon realize that sitting behind a table at a bookstore, even a major bookstore, even one with a high level of customer traffic, quickly becomes more embarrassing than productive. Casual customers instinctively shy away from anyone trying to put them in the awkward position of having to buy something, so even if the author would welcome the company of a conversation with a total stranger after several hours of lonely isolation behind a stack of books, it’s not likely to materialize.

If it does, it usually comes in the form of someone asking, “You write this book?” or “I have a novel I’ve been meaning to write. Let me tell you about it.” Such questions almost never result in a sale any more than do more common queries such as “Does this store sell CDs?” and “Why can’t they get current issues of Sports Afield?” I think the most memorable query I’ve ever had was when a large, sweaty woman carrying an infant marched up to me and asked if she could use my table to change the kid’s diaper.

###

I am certain many writers reading this will object and say that they’ve had marvelous outings, that they have consistently appeared in even the tiniest and most obscure bookstores and have sold hundreds of copies in mere minutes. I have to confess that I’ve also had positive experiences from time to time. But almost every one was the result of extraordinary publicity being done in advance of my appearance or was in connection with a reading, lecture or other presentation. Horror stories abound about single, free-standing events, even from well-known, celebrity-status writers. Best-selling-novelist Robert James Waller’s premiere signing for the first novel he published following the celebrated The Bridges of Madison County was held in a hardware store, as there was no bookshop in his new hometown of Alpine, Texas. The store’s manager kept a small section of books and magazines off to one side, and the hapless author, who had previously been on David Letterman, Good Morning, America, and other national programs, found himself sandwiched in-between garden implements and lawn sprinklers.

There was, at least, advertising in advance. The store bought a large boxed newspaper announcement of the writer’s appearance to autograph copies of his new book. In the same ad, however, was a notice that there was a closeout special on painting supplies and that customers could also appear on that date to register their children for the area’s Little League Baseball teams.

One imagines a snuff-jawed rancher wheeling up in his Dodge Cummins Diesel, coming in and approaching Waller, saying, “Don’t want no damn book. But I’ll take a can of that spacklin’, an’ while you’re at it, can you sign little Bubba-Bob here up for short stop?” Reportedly, Waller’s sales totaled less than a dozen volumes.

In another instance, a first-time writer arrived at a mall store delighted to see long lines forming outside the bookstore where she was to sign. Excited, she scrambled into place, only to find that a major NFL star was also appearing at the same time to autograph copies of his “photographic biography.” She sold no books at all that day but was asked to watch small children while their parents stood in line for the football star’s signature.

###

Obviously, publicity is expensive and sometimes hard to manage, even when writers are willing to pay for it themselves. Some writers arrive at signings armed with a fist full of graphic publicity materials to distribute. Post cards, bookmarks, even canvas tote bags and souvenir umbrellas are parts of such an arsenal of marketing devices.

Unfortunately, none of these have much demonstrable impact on a book’s sales. Readers seldom select a title because they’ve been given a bumbershoot with the writer’s name and book jacket emblazoned in every panel. They’re sometimes embarrassed to open it, even in a downpour.

Writers who do go out of their way to advance their own personal celebrity, often attract the ire of their fellow authors. Western writers sometimes dress outlandishly in boots, gunbelts and bandoleers; romance writers may step out in hoop skirts and toting parasols; and detective writers often don fedoras and wingtips, black suits and narrow neckties. One writer I know travels around with her pet rabbit and another has a jug band that plays music to attract customers. Such carnival-style displays are sometimes the target of sneers and derision from other writers who find such behavior undignified, even when it’s effective.

There is another downside to such signings that isn’t immediately apparent. Irrespective of whatever success or lack thereof a manager—or a writer—has had with signings in the past, or what might be anticipated at any particular event, there is a tendency on the part of bookshops to overorder. Sometimes, hundreds of copies of a book are ordered for a scheduled autograph session. If they don’t sell at the signing—and they almost never do—all but a dozen or so are returned. Those returns skew sales statistics, thereby harming the writer not only on his royalty statements, but also when he tries to obtain another book contract.

Moreover, most people don’t generally want to buy books at store signings unless what they’re seeking is a celebrity’s autograph or a well-advertised best seller. They like to browse books, read a page or two, check out the jacket blurbs before they make a decision. With the author sitting there, pen poised, ready to slap a name across the title page, the pressure is on. It’s the worst kind of hard sell, and it doesn’t take a degree in marketing to know that it doesn’t work with books.

Actually, some people often want the author’s signature but don’t want to buy the book. It’s not at all uncommon for a signing writer to be approached by someone bearing a piece of scrap paper, the back of a deposit slip ripped from a checkbook, a soiled napkin, or some other item to be autographed. One time, I was even asked to sign a book that the customer had merely carried in with her; it wasn’t even one of my own. She explained that she didn’t want to buy a book, she just wanted a signed copy, any signed copy, by anybody.

And then there are the rare book dealers. I was once approached by a fellow with two large grocery sacks full of my books. He wanted me to sign all of them. I was initially flattered, at least until I realized that he had bought none of them from the bookstore sponsoring the event. The tip-off was that he didn’t want them inscribed, merely signed, and not on the bastard title page, but on the flyleaf. I learned that all of them had come from a half-price store, a remainder depot, and he had paid less than fifty percent of original list for all of them. He didn’t even have the temerity to remove the price tag. When I pointed out that this was effectively robbing me of my royalties—as authors receive no return on remaindered or used copies—he was unimpressed; when I refused to sign them so he could market them at many times their original value on eBay, he was incensed. When I demanded that he move aside so someone with a genuine purchase might obtain a signature, he was outraged.

If an author truly wants to become depressed, he should check out the availability of signed titles on line. I’ve learned that my signed copies available for sale are worth more than I ever made on the books in the first place. It astonishes me that my work has more value when it’s used and out-of-print than it does when it’s new and right in front of a potential reader.

And then, there’s the heart-breaking discovery in some used book store that a book I’ve personally inscribed to a friend or co-worker has found its way to the cut-rate shelf. That’s a pretty humbling experience, one that tends to sting for a while.

###

What’s worse than individual autograph session experiences, though, is the mass gathering of authors. Such events are often staged by bookstores during special events (“National Library Week”) or are held in conjunction with writers’ conferences and conventions and the like. They also are sometimes appended to such events as arts and crafts fairs, charity galas, museum parties, and university and college festivals and are particularly popular around the holiday season. They have been held in conjunction with county and state fairs, stock shows and rodeos, and on at least one occasion I know of, as a side-attraction to a tractor pull.

These “cattle calls” are designed to bring together in one place a group of anywhere from a half-dozen to a hundred writers, all seated behind nameplates and stacks of their books for the convenient access, one might think, of eager readers hungry for a stack of autographed books. Sponsors sometimes provide a buffet, maybe a wine and cheese table, or at least a sack of popcorn, and sometimes there actually is music playing in the background.

As a rule, authors of self-help books, cookbooks, how-to books, humor, children’s books, etc., often do well at these events. Such volumes are “gift items,” and some people look forward to the opportunity to clear their Christmas lists with the stroke of one credit card.

But organizers of such events forget one important point: books are expensive. At least, consumers regard books as being expensive, and while those attending such mass signings may stock up for the holiday season, they don’t often buy fiction unless the writer is already enjoying notoriety. It’s not uncommon, then, for more than half the writers present at even large and well-staged mass signings to sell no books at all except, perhaps, to each other. And one of the rules about writers is that they seldom, if ever, buy each other’s books—not at retail—not unless they’re shamed into it.

It is not so strange then to hear a veteran author state that he or she simply does “not do signings.” On the surface, such a caveat seems elitist and snobbish, but those who’ve been through the agony learn fairly quickly that it’s most an embarrassing and sometimes expensive and painful experience.

###

The problem goes back to first principles. Writers, even very good writers, are not the sort of celebrities that excite the general public. Even name-brand writers often disappoint those who stand in line for hours waiting for a scrawled signature across the bastard title page of their purchases. Writers are not automatically beautiful or heroic the way movie stars and sports figures are, and they’re usually not flamboyant and mysterious the way actors and musicians can be. More often they’re rumpled and harried, in need of coiffure or shave, with unpolished shoes and unmanicured fingernails. They usually have bad breath and lack people skills, and they probably are sitting there, watching the clock, needing a smoke or a drink, and desperately wishing they were anywhere but where they are.

It’s a generalization, perhaps, but the sad truth is that some frumpy, middle aged scribbler squinting through bifocals to make sure of the blank spot for a name or dedication to be written is just not very glamorous. Writers are just plain hard to publicize.

It often takes several books before a writer concludes that public signing events—from the lavish to the plain silly—are exercises in futility. Many publishers still apply serious pressure on their authors to engage in these events, almost demanding that the writers demean and embarrass themselves in an effort to promote their own work. And some authors, frankly, have a large enough ego to enjoy or a thick enough skin to endure the whole process no matter how mortifying it might sometimes be. To be honest, there’s really not much choice.

I do hope that one of these days things might change, that I might have a chance to live out the Hollywood fantasy of being overwhelmed with demand for my personal signature on one of my volumes. I also hope to retire in Hawaii and someday to pay cash for a Porsche convertible. Writers deal in dreams, and no matter how unattainable they sometimes seem, they are, perhaps, what keeps us working.

In the meantime, I send this book out to you unsigned, uninscribed. I hope you find it as much fun to read as I found it fun to write, and if you did, let me know. I’ll be happy to sign it for you. If you didn’t, well, it’s only a collection of eyebrows, and I’m sure that, at the end of the day, they’ll need trimming.

BOOKS BY CLAY REYNOLDS

FICTION

The Vigil

Agatite

Franklin’s Crossing

Players

Monuments

The Tentmaker

Ars Poetica

Threading the Needle

Sandhill County Lines

NONFICTION

Stage Left: The Development of the American Social Drama

Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook

One Hundred Years of Heroes:

The Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show

Twenty Questions: Answers for the Aspiring Writer

[With Hunter Lundy] Let Us Prey

The Plays of Jack London