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Quote of the Day: A Life of Play and Why I Joined Ricochet
I was a boy of vast enthusiasms and a fierce love of play. One entire summer we kids on the block played Monopoly almost every day. I also collected and shot marbles, bowled, shot pool, drew cartoons, collected baseball cards and E.C. comics, and read science fiction. (On the right, that’s me as a kid with my family when we lived near the Coliseum in LA)
Best of all were those afterschool sandlot ball games that went on until it grew too dark to play. I never wanted the play to end.
It never did. I grew up but the play continued; only the games changed. I used to think that Wordsworth’s oft-discussed idea, that “the child is father of the man,” was just more of the Romantic Era’s little-children-are-miniature-philosophers nonsense. But I see now that Wordsworth was exactly right, at least about this one idea. My adult diversions, at least, seem to have grown out of childhood play.
Running marathons as an adult grew out of the sandlot sports I loved as a child. Playing banjo and guitar as an adult grew out of playing trumpet in my junior high band. Inventing a board game to sell grew out of a summer of playing Monopoly. And my 50-year adult obsession, making things out of wood, grew out of the measuring, sawing, and nail pounding I did as a kid in order to make various roller-skate scooters and stick-built forts.
Of course, becoming an adult meant that I had to make a living. But I sure as hell didn’t want a job in which I would actually have to, you know, work. So I became a professor. (I never believed that being a professor was real work. My dad, a roughneck in the Signal Hill oil fields, worked. Teaching a poem by Robert Frost was like the engraving on a fancy rifle. It wouldn’t help you shoot straight, but it was pretty to look at and fun to show to your friends.)
Since reading had always been a pleasure and writing had always been a kind of diversion, the university was an ideal venue for adult play. It’s clear now, as I look back, why I specialized in England’s Neo-Classical Era. All of its major writers —Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson — were satirists.
Even lecturing was always more fun than onerous. (I think of myself as an outgoing introvert.) It was always a fascinating challenge to see if I could figure out how to engage my students in learning and discussion. So I would sit up in my office for hours and try to figure out how to, let’s say, get my students involved with Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Most of my solutions involved, in some way or another, an oblique, droll, or humorous slant to the work in question.
I had a student come up after class one day and say, “Don’t you take anything seriously?“ I think he was implying that I didn’t. And you know, the kid was right.
I spent a lot of time drinking coffee in my corner office on the seventh floor of Faculty Hall. I was the Director of Humanities, so I only had to teach nine hours a week. The other 31 hours was largely up to me. No time card. No schedule outside of a few obligatory hours of office time for students. I had soft-landed in a place where I could play.
In my office, I had a pleasant view of my thickly wooded college town. On the desk in front of me, I had a cage with two hamsters, Swift and Pope, with one of those little wheels they like to run on. I had a fancy coffee maker on my desk and one of those little swinging metal ball things that is supposed to illustrate some kind of scientific principle. I had a giant crossword taped to the wall that took me two years to fill in.
If God is as serious as he usually comes across, I’m in big trouble.
Pretty young things, who returned my eager smiles with haughty disdain when I was a callow youth, now had every reason to be nice to me. I was finally sitting in the catbird seat.
All of this might suggest that I was easy on my students. In fact, I had a reputation as a hard grader, the kind you don’t want to take if you’re in love with your GPA. I once had a student, an older man about my age, come up after my writing class and ask, “How come you’re such a bastard?” I think the question was rhetorical, but he still caught me by surprise so I didn’t have a witty rejoinder. But I did come up with a killer of a comeback a mere hour later. Unhappily, no one has called me a bastard since, so my inspired rejoinder lies dormant — though always ready to spring forth and eviscerate anyone who dares call me a bastard again.
One time I did something that sounded adult and serious. Around 1980, I founded an organization called The Kentucky Philological Association. (I just Googled it and found that it’s still going strong, so it’s now about 40 years old.) But I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been a lark and an interesting challenge to sit down and see if I could create an organization ex nihilo. Most everything is a game.
I was, however, never able to figure out how to make a game out of grading student papers. Analyzing student prose and writing comments in the margins is a slog, no matter how you slice it.
When I retired, I spent even more time playing. I started making arty jigsaw puzzles, wooden jewelry for women (not a big success), game boards, little humorous statues, and little coffins for one’s cremains. I sold all of these at Saturday Markets in Eugene and Portland. (Actually, I never sold a single one of the little coffins, which were a drag on the little coffin market.) With a steady retirement income, I had the luxury of making only things that pleased me. I’m now out of the business, but if you want to see some of puzzles, go here.
But finally, in my late 70s, even woodworking began to pall. I had finally burned out on making things out of wood — and most everything else. I was growing old.
What was I going to do? I’m an insomniac and I was accustomed to spending a good part of the night hours in my workshop designing and making things.
It was looking as though I would retire not just from my various enthusiasms, but also from life itself. I could see my future, an old man shuffling around the house in worn slippers until Time, that great destroyer, would finally turn me to dust.
Then about two years ago, I discovered Ricochet. Hello! The site was designed, I read, for those in the “middle to right” part of the political spectrum. That was me! Five bucks a month and there would actually be readers to read what I had written. And the readers and I could go back and forth. And I could make witty comments on other writers’ posts, and they would witty me right back.
By now you probably guess that I would turn Ricochet into a game. You were right. And I keep score. I keep track of how many people give me Likes. (My last post was a new PR, 53 Likes. What do you think of that?) I also have categories called Most Responses to a Post, Most Posts Elevated to Main Feed, and How Many Times I Topped Mrs. She in Likes When We Posted Around the Same Time. (Thus far, we’ve only posted around the same time only once. To my dismay, Mrs. She left me languishing on the Member Feed with a miserable six Likes, while she was promoted to the Main Feed with, I don’t know, a whole bunch of Likes. I stopped counting her Likes after she was promoted. So the score is right now is She 1, Forrester 0.)
At my advanced age, my old friends in the meat world were gradually disappearing, as is the nature of things, but I‘ve made new friends — or at least their artfully constructed projections of their real selves. I’ve gotten to know Quinn the quester, RushBabe the relentless, ‘hant the helpful, Mongo the manly, She the sheep lover, and GrannyDude the philosophic Unitarian preacher from Maine. There are more but I‘ve used up all the alliteration that I can think right now. (Actually, I ran out just before I got to GrannyDude.)
So Ricochet is a godsend. I thought that my life would end on a long boring slog. But no, there’s still time to play and Ricochet is my playground, probably my last one.
When I carved a happy face 
into the little box that will someday hold my ashes, I thought I did it on a whim and perhaps an amusement for my grandkids someday. Now I see that that happy face actually sums up my attitude toward life.
If my mom were still alive, I know what she would say: “Wiseacre to the end.“
Published in General
Heh.
I can’t let that one go. I’m too fond of it.
I just barely remember the episode, but it does sound purposely humorous. I¡ll have to go back and reread the passage. Thanks for responding.
I’ve always thought Sarah getting pregnant at ninety years old was proof that God has a sense of humor. :-)
Your forgot the one little person, aside from Marie, who helps keep you active and amused: Bob.
Goldwaterwoman, you’re absolutely right. I laugh at Bob at least fifteen times a day. I just fed him a treat enclosed in a special ball. He had to work hard to get at the treat. I must have laughed five times as he worked at it. He takes his treats so seriously and one is never enough. He’s now at my feet looking up, an expectant look on his face, always hoping for more.
They have the same problem in Russia. Happens a lot to journalists and doctors.
Except for the last part.
That is a great way to do it, Cow Girl. Meeting them halfway.
I’m with you, I always carefully went over my professor’s comments and appreciated how they thought through my paper. Not all students do this, especially not when they are in high school or younger.
You bastard!
Well you’re one too, so there! [Consider yourself eviscerated.]
Oh I thought you would go for the old sticks and stones routine. I feel like a winner now. Of course an eviscerated winner.
Kent, who did the artwork in your post? Thanks.
Flicker, I did. At one time I wanted to be a commercial artist, but that didn’t work out. I also made the clock.
It’s extraordinary.
And yes, I recognize the style of the clock. Your puzzles are fantastic as well. (Are some of them 3-dimensional in how their pieces fit together?)
Added: Oh, and your Japanese artwork is beautiful.
You are a Renaissance man if ever there was one. I’ll echo everyone else and say I loved the post. It’s gorgeously written.
David Holper wrote a great poem about Eutychus.
It’s a good read.
Why thank you Lois. Your words start off my day just right.
Score!!!!! :)
Forrester – 100 :: World – 0
What a wonderful post!
Let’s see… bitter irony. “There weren’t enough graves in Egypt? You had to drag us all the way out here to die?”
How about: mankind builds the biggest tower possible. But it is, from the divine perspective, so very small that G-d has to come down just to get a good look at it. The joke’s on man.
Comedy of errors with Joseph’s brothers not recognizing him. Cruel sibling payback.
?
Thanks, iWe. It was fun to write.
Plus the scene with Elijah and the priests of Baal. “What’s wrong with your gods’ hearing? Maybe you’re not shouting loud enough.” So funny.
Jacob’s uncle slipping him the wrong bride in the dark on his wedding night might qualify.
The boy Samuel running to Eli several times, thinking the boss had been calling for him.
Retic, you might be right. But it’s easy to misinterpret small narratives from the distant past. What might look funny to us may not have been funny at all to the writer of a particular episode. It sounds funny when Tobit, lying on his back, has a bird poop in his eye, but I took another look at the episode, and I think I was wrong. The writer was not telling that story to elicit a smile.
There’s quite a bit of bitter irony in the Jewish Bible, but irony is more clever than comical.
Mama Toad, now that one sounds as if were written for comical effect. Bitter comedy and heavily sarcastic — but comedy, no matter how slight.
But why was it necessary for the writer to have intended them as comedy? The stories were remembered and retold more easily because there was a humorous aspect to them. Same with a lot of stories from our own pasts that we might tell on ourselves, orally or here on Ricochet.
The entire Book of Esther is ironic, full of comic elements and twists.