Die Trying: Part II

One of the many family jokes at my expense is about my Type A personality. Several of us are taken prisoner by terrorists of some kind.  “We are going to shoot one of you every hour," the burly leader threatens.  “I’ll go first!” I yelp.  My cool, calm son-in-law, Tim, would say, “I’ll go last, and I would also like to go over this plan with you.” He’s an investment counselor, so he’s used to money--volatility, extreme nervousness, and Type A folks like me, who like the Rainbow trout in our famous Yellowstone River, leap for the first fly.  [I must mention here that I do eat fish, but I do not catch them. I leave such sport to Bruce Hafen and Vic Forsnes, two experts who also find time to read books and do tons of church work.]

It did not surprise my wife, when for my 40^th birthday, I treated myself to a DNR bracelet. “Do Not Resuscitate.” Good fortune and the Lord’s protection kept me safe for my wife and family until everyone was squared away... sort of.

When Carolyn passed away, I (as the kids say), “tricked out" myself with an additional DNR necklace the size of a Harley Davidson Motorcycle chain.

When I moved to Austin, however, I found myself in the paper-chase capital of the US.  Only the Germans love stamp-pads, duplicate copies, and legal work more than Texans.

Jumping through the hoops, I became completely paranoid.  I added reduced-size copies of my Living Will to my necklace, a list of my children’s phone numbers, my attorney’s number and copies of all ephemera in my bedroom. Sharon and Steve Oakey can testify of my madness.  When I told them what I was schlepping around my neck, they doubted.  I lifted my shirt, which was about as horrifying as lifting a pant leg. There dangled a deck of documents that looked like a cool hand right out of Vegas.

When I moved to Texas to live with my daughter, Lora and her family, Austin officials told me I was “completely unofficial.”  My Living Will is invalid in Texas, so I hired a new attorney for a Living Will which includes the added word "TEXAS."

And yes, I also had to buy new DNR bling, engraved “Texas style”: “Texas OOH," which translated into Idahoan means, “In the country of Texas, do not resuscitate me Outside Of Hospital.” But my paranoia still drives me to wonder whether a rookie nurse would know what she should not do inside the hospital.

Finally, full of frustration, I wrote the Surgeon General.  I’m guessing it’s the gal with the uniform and all that fruit salad on her chest.  My complaint went unanswered, though I was sent an interview schedule should I wish to fly to Washington DC to talk things over.  I leave you with the paragraph that sums up the agitation of a transplanted Idahoan, where rules are anathema.

“My point, Madam/Staff member/General, is that I’m still trying to figure out just what one must do here in order to have a “clean” death.  How in the Hell does one die inexpensively and quickly?  How do I stay in the Tunnel before an overly-anxious intern pulls me back into the relentless heat and drought of this place?  Like Rick, in “Casablanca,” I was “misinformed about Texas being part of these United States.  The folks here tell me I need a separate, unique Texas Living Will.  What happens, General, if some tourist from South Dakota happens to face-plant in downtown Austin while on vacation?” 

So, take this for what it’s worth.  Probably nothing.  At an assisted care facility in Rexburg, of 80 patients, only 5 had DNRs.  Someone has to pay the light bill in that building on the hill.  I think I know who.  Let me end this jaundiced diatribe with a book suggestion that just might change your life—and your death:  Susan Jacoby’s, Never Say Die.

Why Climbing Mt. Everest Can Be Dangerous: Part I

As a life-long Latter-day-Saint, I have spent what amounts to years studying and meditating on the subject of ascent to God.  Now in my late winter years, I have come to worry about what I will call the “quantitative view of exaltation.”

Let me begin by saying that the “children of Christ” I have met in this life seem in little danger of resting on their laurels, of saying what TS Eliot has a character mutter, “now that’s over and done.”  No, the woman of Christ leans into the wagon wheel, her strength often greater than her priesthood man [or often even stronger when there is no man at all] beside her.  Those who listened to King Benjamin’s conference address, “had no more inclination to sin.”  They were a safe bet in the Kingdom.

We must remember as we struggle to ascend our individual Everest, we move at different paces.  Some of us seem to have better equipment; sometimes better guides; stronger lungs; strong enough, in fact, to “ascend” without oxygen:  A rare phenomenon.  As God’s children, we are all on the same spiritual Everest.  The rule on earth’s Everest, however, is “everyone for himself.  If you fall or fail, you die alone.”

When disaster struck the Mountain Madness climbing team and clients in 1996, a sudden storm, miscommunication and terrible mistakes left 8 men frozen to death on Everest.  “The Mother is mad,” warned the sherpas, who fretted about the land-fill that sacred ground is becoming.  Some clients had even crossed over the threshold and committed “squiggly squiggly.”  The Mother Mountain does not tolerate irreverence or just plain risk-taking, a form of mockery.

So, we ask, “how do I Summit?”  The answer is shocking.  No one summits alone.  No calling, no diploma, no amount of church work or hours of toil will lift us there.  And everyone will summit!  Yes, some of us don’t get very far and freeze up towards the top.

  

Some of us barely make base camp, which is, after all, 20,000 feet in the air.  My friends Kitsi and Bobby Hacken hiked to base camp.  She was suddenly struck down with altitude sickness.  Altitude sneaks up on a climber, killing brain cells, leaving one disoriented, upside down, thinking oxygen bottles are empty when they are full, etc.  Kitsi is lucky to be alive.  This autumn they are back in Nepal, anxious to give it another try.

And what of those who never even make it to Nepal?  The young missionary, killed in a car wreck in Santiago; the overzealous Laurel who swims out too far in San Diego Bay; the child born just long enough to seize a dozen gulps of air; the Brazilian street child who wanders through life, living out of garbage cans; the African children’s army full of 8-year olds who can shoot an AK-47... and then quietly cry all night for his raped and murdered mother.  Or let us remember the aged, imprisoned, the walking moribund.  Those whose lives, who minds and bodies hover in a kind of state of paralysis.  Do they count?  Where on Everest are they?  Camp 4?  Nepal?

Let me end with a delicate, even sacred concept.  Is our obsession with longevity driven by a notion that we need to live until 80 or our lives “don’t count?”  We make covenants which promise us eternal life. “Oh death, where is Thy sting?”  Living until 80 or a 100 or having at least 5 children are simply a function of our culture.  When I was growing up, people wanted to reach 72.

Now medical science has contrived ways of extending longevity—but not for free.  85% of what you’ll spend on doctors and medicine, you will spend those last five years of "life."  And what about those glossy AARP covers?  Yes, a couple in their 70s, tanned, sinewy, powered by tennis in the morning, martinis in the afternoon and, of course, at night, Viagra, the wondrous elixir of our new century.

Few people past 70 enjoy that embellished AARP world.  Quality dies but the body “lives.”  If we believe in the covenants we've made, why not get on with the Other World we spend so much time talking about, worrying about, sacrificing for?  “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.”

The real secret has been there all the time:  Grace.  “For with grace I can do all things.”  No grace; no summit.  Doug Hansen, who failed to summit in ’95 with the Mountain Madness team, was able to summit the second time in '96.  He was too late, however, to descend.  He called his pregnant wife to say good-bye. 

Perhaps, stretching our analogy an inch, he believed too much in himself and not enough in One who promises victory at the top.

Wind Journeys

In the best of all westerns, “Lonesome Dove,” Cal [Tommy Lee Jones] keeps his promise in the end to bury Gus [Robert Duval], his best friend, near a little creek where Gus and Clara spent the day under a stand of almond trees—2500 miles away in Arkansas.  Watching the film for the fourth time, I questioned my two grandsons, Josh [whom we now call Newt, a character from the film] and Cam [now dubbed “Lonesome Cal] just how “rational” such an honorable promise really is—to haul the body of a dead friend 2500 miles on a buckboard through water-moccasin infested rivers, and over hill and dale. Remember, he had the option to bury the stubborn whiskey-drinking but loveable and honorable Gus in nearby Clara’s orchard in Ogallala.  The boys screamed with one accord, defending Cal’s strict honor code.  “He kept his word."  It’s all about “honor.”  I had questioned the practicality of such a promise.

And then there is old Falstaff’s mockery of that very “honor.”  Honor might “prick one on,” but it won’t cure a wound; “honor," he says, “is a mere word.”  Whenever we think of honor, like Falstaff, we think of the price of the word.  Honor, like all virtues, has its price.  Every soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq thinks about honor and its cost day and night.

When Juliet’s heart carelessly soars to the wrong neighborhood, she hopelessly sighs, "but what’s in a word?”  Her big mistake?  Falling in love with the wrong name.  It’s a social thing.

Montagues and Capulets just don’t mix.  But today's status is more about money.  If one of you has a lot of money, you can raise the other to an “honorable level.”

It  matters little, however, that the old sense of “honor” is disintegrating. Today when we say that a man is “honorable,” we probably mean honest or trustworthy (not necessarily physically attractive), but worth emulating. Who would call Megan Fox [why should I know this at 71?]  honorable, or Ray Lewis [NFL linebacker] honorable?  In fact, “honor” today may be a sweet substitute for being physically unattractive.  Few of us would call Lincoln attractive.  He himself asked a travel-worn photographer, “why would a man ride a horse from Washington DC clear down to Illinois to photograph the ugliest man in the state?”  But  he’s both honorable and beautiful to me because I “know” him from his words.

One more sweet example of honor—the Columbian film, Las Viajes de Viento [“The Wind Journeys”].  Ignacio rides a burro from one end of Columbia to another to return an accordion to his aging teacher. He remains honorable and admirable. We crave that--let me say it--goodness.

Honor even transcends fact; when we see the endless rows of flags that mark the lives of men and women who gave themselves, certainly their sacrifice transcends the questionable fact of “a just cause” in two wars which are pointless and unwinnable.

But honorable sacrifice of those soldiers will surely outlive the folly of such epic waste.

Autumn

Years ago, in 1964, the war in Vietnam was heating up; President Kennedy had been assassinated the year before; I was classified 1-A as of April 1 and could soon be in a place like Kasahn or Saigon.  Until April, though, I was a Mormon missionary in Sarbrucken, Germany, slogging through the rain-soaked leaves, systematically introducing me and my companion as “Mormons," visiting each apartment with an important message.  Not many were buying that autumn, and they hadn’t been terribly anxious the two previous autumns.

As we trudged to the next building, I kicked the golden-brown-grey fallen leaves. “Kick those leaves, Bruder,” I said to Robert Hacken, my swarthy sweet-souled, “Persian” looking companion from California. When we did get into an apartment, it was because some young thing wanted a better look at the “Perser.”  Religion itself was seldom a serious issue with the happy Germans riding the wave of what they called the Wunderwirtschaft—the “miracle economy,” fed in large part by the war that everybody seemed to hate.

“Next year, you’ll be kicking these same leaves, Hacken,” I said, “and I’ll be home, married to Carolyn, snuggling in a run-down apartment within walking distance of the BYU campus, finishing my senior year, reading three books at a time, living on Campbells soup and looking at that giant mountain above campus which had posed two questions the year before my mission:  “Where will I go?” and “Will Carolyn wait?”

Two autumns before, I had sat on a sedgy bank outside Lampertheim.  While Bill Zentner, my first companion [a gem of a missionary], expertly skipped rocks across the pond, I read a contraband copy of Wordsworth’s poetry.

When Carolyn and I moved to Rexburg to teach at Ricks College, we discovered a valley full of saints, a “job” that was a daily blessing, cold—I mean really cold for two people who had spent their youth in Escondido, California.  But we also discovered Autumn in Idaho.

I loved the touch of crisp cold on my nose, the hoar-frost on the lawn—and the turning and the falling of the leaves.  The bustle of returning students.  Coach Tiny Grant’s football team.

And premonitions of death.  The death of spring.  “Leaves, like the things of man,” Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “what the heart [at some point learns] heard of, ghost [spirit] guessed.”  Carolyn died on October 14^th last year—the last day of autumn weather.  Winter suddenly roared into the valley in the days that followed.

For me, however, autumn is, yes, Gerard’s, “sorrow’s springs.”  But death is life; “except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground.”  The autumn of ’65, Carolyn and I married.  A letter arrived from Bobby Hacken in Germany.  Inside was a single leaf.

Big Legs: A Last Look

Several of you outside my family have asked, “what’s up with the legs?” You must remember that I’m a small fellow—5’ 5” resting on a sparrow-like rack.  How much muscle-meat can Mother Nature and a room full of weights stack on such fragile scaffolding?

You’ve figured out that I am a child of the 40s and 50s.  While I hefted iron for hours each afternoon at Sammy’s “gym,” a converted WW2 barracks, I gazed fondly at Steve Reeves’ glossy photo, the star of "Hercules," the 1956 movie.  And those giant 18-inch calves!  Be patient, friends.  This was before energy supplements and steroids and exercise equipment designed by the same fellas who build space shuttles. Today most high school tackles have 18-inch calves and probably weigh 260 pounds.  But I kept working, knowing, as that wise old Irishman William Butler Yeats said, that “we must labor to be beautiful.”

Now I’ve found that women know when they have beautiful legs—or even pretty good legs.  So, they show them; walk consciously on them; swing them while they sit in the dentist office; and occasionally make a half-turn in the Walmart parking lot and “check them” [while we boys and old men also check them].

But men, on the other hand, are not conscious of their--pardon me--exquisite legs—unless they live at Muscle Beach in Venice, California. But I’m talking about Austin, Texas, or even Rexburg, Idaho, where it takes either guts or stupidity to show your legs in such climate. Or great legs.  Yet even there, I still found that inexplicable masculine unconsciousness of raw leg power.

Case in point:  When Steve Allen came by my house with a piece of cake and a note, I ---yes, you know, looked at his calves.  He had been running.  A piano professor, blessed with the fingers of a fine cardiologist, he did not “seem” to be a man with Steve Reeves’ calves. But there they were.  I gasped, “great legs, Steve; I mean really thick calves.”  Smiling and sweet, as usual, he guilelessly replied, “Oh, yeah, all of us guys in the family have, ahh, large legs.”

And then there’s another friend—Steve Oakey. I home taught him and Sharon for years before I actually saw his legs—which is a good thing, you’re thinking.  Then a couple of years ago at Rexburg's Whoopie Day parade, there he was, whistle in mouth, drill team employees in synchronized step obediently dancing their march behind him. Big calves and not a word about his legs for three years of home teaching.  He didn’t even consciously or unconsciously pull up a pant leg.  And Sharon never even threw herself on his left calf and said, “see, see what I have here?!”  She’s kind, so I think she saw one of my pant legs slide up.  “All heart,” she probably thought, “but no legs.”  Henry VIII had no heart but is said to have had a “great leg.”

One more example.  Yesterday, sitting in the pharmacy, A hulk of a specimen sat down next to me.  My eyes quickly checked out. . . . his calves; huge, rippled, strips of striated muscle embossed on a slab of calf the size of the prime rib at Texas Land and Cattle [local restaurant].  I bravely leaned forward, looked him square in the eye and then scoped out his calves, risking death by gun shot [they pack heat here in Texas] or a broken jaw.

“Pardon me, sir, may I just say in all innocence and honesty that when the Good Lord handed out legs, you were first in line; and I was obviously lost, off reading a book or something.”  He smiled, Texas style, and said, “Hell, man, I never give notice.  Growin’ up I was a lanky kid, built like a bean-pole.  After I up and married and started gettin’ three squares a day and a little lovin’ at night and playin’ golf with the boys, they just kinda puffed up.”

And there you are.  Humming “The Impossible Dream” to myself, my mind drifted to the Mormon resurrection.  “Let me see, if I can help build a world, could I slip off for a few minutes and build myself a pair of Steve Reeves?

Roots - Part II

Yesterday we established that you children, through your mother, are definitely Asian.  My personal research, however, has taken me to different cultural roots.  The good news, folks, is that—yes—your old dad/grandpa is a cultural Jew.  Not a theological Jew per se, but Jewish in style and humor.  My ethos was built in Jerusalem—or, ahhh, New York.  So, my friends, I share my new “deep” self with this striking list of evidence:

1.   I am circumcised.

2.   Some of my "people" have aquiline noses.

3.   Richie Cline called me a Schlemiel in the 5th grade.

4.   Cory Stanton "persecuted me" and beat me up in the 6th grade.

5.   As a descendent of Oklahoma Oakies, Our people were driven out of Egypt [Oklahoma] to the Promised Land [California].  I might add, I now feel comfortable using the term, “my people.”

6.   My mother was Jewish, in that she could both cook and swear [a real Meshuggeneh].

7.   Ask me how I’m feeling, and I’ll respond, “bettah...” but never “great!”

8.   I speak German, which is close to Yiddish, so I know how to putsn around the house with a dust cloth.

9.   I did not play football.  My calves are small and I’m a bleeder.

10.  I now sleep with my glasses on [Woody Allen].

11.  I don't like pork.

12.  I like Bagels.

13.  I own stock in a Tofu company [kosher cheese product].

14.  All of my children and grandchildren are brilliant.

15.  I charge 20% interest on all "loans" to my children.

16.  I am now part of the Diaspora, living in exile in Austin, Texas.

Mazel Tov

Roots

Dear Kids, 

I think it's time to let the cat--or should I say dog--in light of Marc's recent gift/purchase of a 2 lb. wonder dog--out of the bag. We've all read the recent article about parenting styles in America (Tiger Mothers).  Seems the Chinese/Asian parents are toughest.  Results? Their kids flood Berkley and Harvard, master the piano or violin [but not brass instruments], and literally destroy the class curve from pre-school to graduate school.

So you ask me were we "Chinese" parents or "American" pushovers? Actually Chinese--for two reasons. 

Think of our parenting style.  Telling Marcus his own body heat would warm his room; the 1x1 egress window in his room in case of fire.  And Heather's room had only half a cable of ceiling heat, which never went on till 10 p.m. [Pacific Power off-peak constraints, you remember].  Alison was surrounded by floor to ceiling books, but no egress window; Lora no heat [by choice].  You all did your own laundry from age 10--after 10 p.m., before 6 a.m. or, thankfully, on weekends [but not Sundays].

And who can forget the Home Evening wherein I all but demonstrated that you girls could get "by" with two squares of toilet paper.  "Spare a Square."  Then there was the collective "month of darkness" when I shoved our little black and white Walmart TV into the video closet because of "gross infractions" watching HBO [which remained blacked out].

Secondly, perhaps shockingly to you, Heather, Swedish girl, you are all of Chinese descent through your mother and her father, Nathan. His mother was Chinese; his father, a French plantation owner in French Indo-China. Think about it: black hair, suspiciously dark "tan" year round, and that strange grimace-grin-"smile" both he and your mother, Mama San, have in all your pictures of them.  In Chinese, such a misinterpreted "smile" is called a Sanko Hahn Bo. "Translation: "the grimace caused by sour grapes."

Let me end this, perhaps, painful revelation by a cursory inventory of Mama San's kitchen: blue willow Chinese plates, chopsticks, a wok, lots of mixed vegetables, herb tea each morning, drunk while looking out the kitchen window, hand on hip.  

If "they" should take us over in your lifetime, simply tell them, "they is us!"

Woman: God's Best Work

Along the way to meteoric fame, Charles Dickens, aging, famous and now restless, arranged a secret “tea” with a former girlfriend who had rejected him earlier in his life.  Heavier beyond his dreams of her once figure eight, missing teeth and blushing and awkward, their tea remained tea and never a tryst.  He ushered her to the door within minutes.  Dreams and reality; the past and the present.

What is it about women that make men love them?  In “Moonstruck,” Johnny says, “men chase women because they fear death”; but some men, like Mark Anthony, actually seek death when they meet the Cleopatra of their lives.  And every man has a Cleopatra he should have run from.

My own California version of that Egyptian siren was both a figure eight and a mane of unmanageable blonde hair.  The Beach Boys come to mind.  As I’ve told my son, “what would have happened had my usually wise Oakie father said, 'Son, just what are your intentions here?'” I think pain was inevitable even if I’d had “intentions.”

It took some years and some fumbling and stumbling but I finally healed.  No balm of Gilead in beer and other girls, even a score of them were certainly no salve for the wounds and contusions of love’s war.

I finally found the True Healer, The Savior, and set out on a very different journey, inspired by a berry-brown green-eyed California girl [yes, same town, same name], who helped me get to Germany on an LDS mission.  When I returned, we married, graduated from BYU and then graduated again from the University of Oregon graduate school.  Charles Henboker’s unremarkable life kept me from sinking; Carolyn’s love and constancy, in spite of a growing crescendo of physical and emotional pain, sustained me—even when it meant moving to Rexburg, Idaho, a mere 80 minutes from Yellowstone.  Rexburgers know cold.

The last six months of Carolyn’s life she spent in the Homestead Assisted Care Facility.  Each day, for exercise, I walked the mile to The Ranch and served as a volunteer.  There I met a dozen angel-ladies whose dreams of life, lived out, perhaps, but who now found themselves in the nightmare world of Alzheimer’s disease.

After the initial revulsion of nursing home odor washed over me, I got my bearings and set to work washing dishes and helping patients move from their rooms or from the television to the dinner table.  I prayerfully and patiently and blessedly got past the smell of urine, of cooking food, and all of those things that make us human—functions of the human body that an otherwise genius Jonathan Swift could not endure—in others or in himself.  Scatology.

When I looked into Carolyn’s eyes in the moonlight on a summer evening in Escondido, I could only see a wife.  Later, after our four children arrived and we closed the door, I watched her age and suffer.  And I found I was getting a new heart—a better one—a sweeter one.  When our angel grandchildren came, Carolyn was ready.  Now a grandmother; and a good one.  I had not seen that in her eyes and her beautiful thick black hair on those days on the shores of Del Mar.

Now she and the other dozen women began to take on a beauty of their own.  I often brushed tears from my eyes when Thelma asked me tenderly, “can you tell me when Alfred is coming for me?” Or when my own Lonesome Dove pleaded with me to take her home by Thanksgiving—“at least by Thanksgiving,” she wept.

All Cleopatras become old.  Elizabeth Taylor died, and only 1 in 20,000 teenagers would even look up from a screen to say, “whatever,” or “never heard of her.” Brittany Spears will need a walker someday.

But what endures are the battle scars: The C-Section scar; the stretch marks. Those buns of steel melt into cellulite, the American obsession, the breasts lose their lift.  Gravity will win out.  Here comes entropy.

Yes, but the Human Spirit endures; the heart grows larger, sweeter.  I can still detect the faint odor of my grandma Lucy, her arms around me, hugging me as if I were the last child on earth, crooning to me in Spanish and English, her deep, throaty voice, an unforgettable serenade.  Beauty is becoming old, even when the eyes are vacant and the mind is often in another place.  Patience stamps its signature and makes our women saints.  They are the miracle: their inner and outer landscape, God’s best work.

"Son, Lower Your Expectations"

My wise father, sitting quietly in our old green lounge chair, watched me heave my barbells while he tried to make out an image amidst the snow storm on our 1954 black and white Mentor television.  In between vigorous sets, he would take his pipe out of his mouth and say, "Son, tinker with those 'rabbit ears' and push the 'booster' buttons"---high tech gadgets that would occasionally bring us Frosty Frolics, a skating program, or Spike Jones.  He worked at watching; I worked at weight lifting.  I looked down at my legs, designed along the lines of the broom my mother was using in the kitchen at the time.  The coach, nose in my face, had said that afternoon, "Thompson, you'll need a pair of legs if you want to play football next year.  You have a linebacker's heart and the legs of a small robin."  "Pop, I said in frustration in the middle of the 108th squat, I ain't got legs enough."  He took his pipe out, smiled, motioning for me to tinker the booster.  "There are some things in life some of us have to be content to watch others do.  Lower your expectations, son."  It took 12 days of practice and one game to learn my lesson. "I quit, coach, I said.  Heart ain't enough.  I ain't got the legs of a linebacker."  I turned in my gear and walked the 3 miles home.

Henry Boker

I nearly called this blog "Henboker" because no one in the world knows who Henry Boker is--or ever was. That's why I chose him for my dissertation topic. As a young Turk at BYU trying to do an MA, I thought I was smart enough to do something significant about someone significant. When Robert Thomas said there were more than 2,000 articles on Herman Melville back in 1959, I began to wonder. Later, at the University of Oregon, the only school that liked me, I reached for the academic stars. Nothing. When time came to write a dissertation, I decided to try and write something insignificant about someone insignificant. The fact that my user name has been Henboker for five years with conflict or questions proves my graduate school dodge: I found one small tree in the middle of an endless Gobi desert. I remain alone, Jonah-like, without a gourd, without any bitterness towards Ninevah. I shared an exciting academic life with fellow faculty members and thousands of students at Ricks College and BYU over  37 years. There must be a moral here. My mother-in-law, enraged that I still hadn't learned or cared how to fold a wet umbrella the "correct" way, said "there are only two classes of people: slobs and those who do things "correct." My mind floated back to my neglected Charles Boker. My work was in neither class: slob-like or "correct." It was a mediocre job about a mediocre man. The blessing in my life is Herculean curiosity--a deep heart-felt  and cerebral desire to know things. No polyglot here, just  a man who arises each morning anxious about--let's see--my battered copy of Spanish for Dummies, or a rereading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.