Last night I started watching television with my wife. Wicked was on. I didn’t really have an interest in it but knowing Francie had read the book I figured what the hell? We were watching the opening scene when a friend called her. I paused the program for about 5 minutes until I realized this was a long rambling social call.
As a result, I decided to write something. Having read Hemingway recently I kept thinking about his assertion that putting down on paper 'one true sentence’ will lead to better writing writing. I searched for one true sentence but such things do not come easy. I gazed out my window and watched for a few minutes as the day faded into the night. It was at that point that I found my true sentence. I will post it below.
After writing a couple of paragraphs I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Too short for a blog post and too wordy for Facebook I thought. But I didn’t want to stash it in the 'I wrote this' file with a date and an odd title. If I had done that, it would have been filed in 2025->Writings->7 Abril 2025 Evening Walk. My final decision was to post it along with a twilight picture on Facebook.
Damn if it didn’t get some of the finest responses. So, I think we can draw two things from this. First, there is something to Papa's one true sentence idea. Second, inspiration comes in many forms including trying to avoid a normal and mundane telephone conversation. Grab inspiration where you can.
***
Often I walk in the last blue moments of the evening. This is that hour where light is mostly a memory painted across a western horizon so pale as to be nigh on imperceptible. My steps still fall one after another but slower than they did five years ago. And fall so much slower than they did fifty years ago.
But it doesn’t matter. I walk because I have always loved to see the world as it is, as it was, as it is becoming. In those two miles I circuit I observe stone and glass. I see decay and endeavor. I see impatience, love, indifference, anger and sometimes angelic peace.
My evening walks are a time for reflection. They are often a meditation where I empty my mind using the rote rhythm of my steps as my mantra. Walking down the narrow sidewalks of this old city forges a connection with the world around me. In the changing landscape I observe and in the people I pass I witness the subtle transitions of life. Forty minutes of contemplation, where the past intertwines with the present usually refreshes my spirits. Life flows on with me for now. And in the joy and madness of the city streets I am reminded of the fragile beauty of our world.
Go outside. Talk a walk if you can. At the very minimum inhale the late evening air and savor the moment where day becomes night.
Unexpected things happen. Cars skid on wet roads. Ice dams break. Buildings collapse without apparent reason. A tsunami rushes down a channel, flooding farms, fields, and towns. Snow falls in the first week of September, dusting blood-red roses with white. Working late and on deadline, you reach over to move your mouse, and your elbow brushes inadvertently against your project partner’s fully clothed breast. Laughing, she leans in and kisses you.
For a moment, the world stands still. You are uncertain what to do next.
Surprised, you pull back. You look at her, with neither too long nor too short a glance. You are trying to gauge her feelings. You try to understand what just happened. Was the kiss meant seriously? Was it just a bit of humor to defuse the situation? Perhaps you lean in for another kiss, embracing the unexpected. Or perhaps you chuckle quietly and suggest a study break to figure out what just happened.
Following the kiss, surprise, excitement, and a hint of awkwardness mingle together. Your heart races. The organ is uncertain whether it should slow down to a normal rate or stay pulsing for whatever comes next.
Your mind struggles to catch up. You feel so many things in so few seconds. Exhilaration, curiosity, and maybe a little trepidation take hold. Your mind keeps asking, “What just happened?” Some first kisses are like that.
In reality, most first kisses are predictable. Some kisses are as formal as sending a thank-you note, simply the punctuation mark at the end of a date. Leaving a date with a quick peck near the doorway is almost standard. It says this night is over and no more than that.
Where the first kiss happens may reveal much more about its meaning. The first kiss could come outside someone's house, leaving a movie, or in a parking lot. A first kiss in a public place may be nothing more than an enhanced handshake. However, a first kiss taking place in a quiet, isolated space can be the mark of growing intimacy.
First kisses often fade from our memories.
Last kisses are different. Last kisses can linger over years, over decades, over the span of a life.
Last kisses can have a profound emotional impact. They can carry the weight of finality. Their memory may trigger deep sadness or bring a wry smile. They can be the markers of life before or of life after. Sometimes, a last kiss marks the end of the most significant chapter in one’s life.
A last kiss can carry within it, within two pairs of lips touching—regret, nostalgia, sadness, betrayal, longing, and the deepest sorrow imaginable. Those lips joining one last time can leave an indelible impression resonating long after the kiss itself has faded. The thing is, one or both of the people touching lip to lip may not know this is it, this is the last kiss.
It is possible that in the days and weeks leading up to a last kiss, there may be tension in the air. Each party in the relationship may have some unspoken sense that something has changed, and not for the better. Words choked back and lingering glances say something is wrong, something is troubling. But when the last kiss comes, it is often a surprise.
It's the unpredictability of a last kiss that makes it so poignant and haunting. First kisses carry the promise of beginnings. Last kisses arrive without warning, catching us unprepared for their enduring significance. The moment might only be recognized for its finality in hindsight, leaving echoes of what was and what might have been.
Max & Sam
Mid-March nights in the Midwest are bleak and cold. Daytime temperatures may top the freezing mark, but nights will be much colder. Sudden brief snow showers scatter a few flakes about. Breath still steams in streetlamp light. Clapping your hands together for warmth brings a soft patting sound from your soft leather gloves. This was the kind of night Samantha, Sam to everyone, was heading out into.
To those who knew her, this cold weekend seemed like a break for Sam. She told Max, her boyfriend of almost a year, that being home for more than a few hours was intolerable. There were reasons, real reasons, she needed to get away and be gone. Between the darkness of emotions at work and her parents’ unrelenting judgment of her situation, Sam needed some air, some real distance.
Currently, Sam’s days are spent working at a home for troubled kids. These were abused kids. These were tough kids who acted out in violent and sometimes devastatingly tragic ways. Her job was to ensure nobody’s lid blew. She also made sure people got to lessons and mealtimes, that the kids observed reasonably acceptable hygiene, and that nobody did something they could not come back from. Her job was tough and emotionally draining and hard to turn off when her shift ended.
The country was in recession. Times were tough. For a young woman with a degree in general humanities with a minor in public service studies, nobody was hiring. Department stores weren’t giving her a second look. The state was shedding workers. Sam basically had to take the first job that was offered. The only positions out there for her were as aides in social work or quasi-social work settings.
Sam lived with her parents, but that wasn't ideal. Still, the rent was free. Free she could afford. In addition, they let her use one of the family’s cars to drive to and from work. But the price for free rent, free room and board, and free use of the car was unending lectures on her poor life choices from both of her parents.
Her parents had repeatedly told her during her college career that she would be unemployable with her degree. Each of them took her aside at various points over the last five years, urging her to change her major. They urged her to take accounting and general business courses, but Sam flatly refused. She was committed to a plan, a nebulous plan. In the end, even Sam couldn't verbalize the goals of that plan to herself.
On this cold March Friday, she shepherded the kids, her kids, to dinner and back to the cottage. The night staff came in at 6:00, and Sam did not linger. Sam got home from work at about 6:45. She had packed her overnight bag the night before and made arrangements for her mother to drop her off at the Amoco station. The Amoco was the Trailway’s bus pickup here in this sprawling suburban village.
Her mother knew Sam was traveling to see Max. Mom was okay with that. Sam’s mom would also be happy for a weekend without fighting, without walking on eggshells. Sam’s mom had no illusions about what would happen this weekend. She put Sam on the pill at 15 because the girl was precocious. Maybe if her daughter got laid, some of the anger would fade.
To Sam’s mom, Max was tolerable. He wasn’t a drunk or a druggie, and Max was pursuing a decent degree in engineering. If anything, Sam’s mom thought that Max might be too normal for Sam. Maybe he would be a good influence on Sam. As always, the bus ride took about seventy minutes on mostly freeway roads. Sam didn’t pack headphones this time and had forgotten her book. She just pushed the seat back and listened to the tires go zing, zing, zing as the big old beast rolled on.
There were three small-town stops between Sam’s home and the college campus. Passing the first one, Sam wondered why they even swung by these stops. Almost nobody ever got on or off at any of them. Sam adjusted her position and stared out the window. She got mentally lost, almost hypnotized, watching the lights across the dark fields appear and then fade.
Sam was jolted back into focus when the bus made the arcing turn off the freeway and rolled down the ridiculous high offramp bridge down to the streets of her destination. Gears were grinding, and the comfort of the freeway ride was replaced with jumps and jolts and the rocking of the bus as it hit potholes and twisted through narrow turns on neighborhood streets. A few minutes later, the bus rolled into the station, and about half the passengers disembarked. Sam just had a backpack filled with two nights’ necessities, so the creaking and banging of the doors beneath the bus were irrelevant to her.
Sam didn't have to look far to see Max waiting. When he saw Sam, Max dropped his cigarette, crushed it out, and came over and gave her a very comforting hug. It was almost nine thirty when Sam and Max walked together, his arm around her shoulders, back to his room. Sam had grabbed a sandwich back home, washing it down with Diet Coke before heading out. Max ate in the cafeteria during the 5-7 dinner hours. Max was a four-year dorm rat. The prospect of buying and cooking food frightened him.
Max was a year younger than Sam. They had met in the fall of the previous year when she punched meal tickets in the dorm’s cafeteria. Little daily conversations and jokes led to a date. A date led to drinks, then sex, and finally to their almost year-long relationship.
This was Max's last semester. He would graduate in May if his team could get their shit together and finish their capstone project for Design Day. Prima Donnas all. But all the drama of his team and the pressure of the design project fell away because Sam was here. Max was hoping he would get a job close to Sam upon graduating and that maybe they could take the next steps.
The walk back to Max’s dorm was quite cold. But there was no snow or rain and the stars were out. Max kept his arm around Sam the whole way back. Feeling her soft, warm body next to his made Max forget about all the pressures and tensions of this, his last term. In addition to the project, he had more job interviews scheduled for the end of next week. But with Sam’s black hair and piercing blue eyes beside him, there was no world but them, there was no time but now.
Max’s roommate had taken the early bus back to the city. It was probably the same bus Sam rode here on, a turnaround trip. Max pulled his arm from around Sam to get out his key. As soon as the lock clicked open, Sam pushed into the room while Max turned around to lock the lock. Turning back into the room, Max saw Sam’s jeans were already on the floor and she was wiggling her way out of her soft white panties. Before Max could kick off his shoes, Sam was naked and on his lower bunk with her legs open and a sly smile on her face.
Max and Sam made intense love on that narrow bed. It was so rigorous that Sam’s kicks upward pushed the top bunk off two of the short metal posts that connected the foot ends of the two beds. The upper bunk half collapsed on them and they rolled apart laughing. Max, quite naked, jumped out of bed and set things aright and then crawled back in. They finished their lovemaking in a quieter, more tender way. When they were done, their bodies remained pressed close together. Sam usually talked after sex, but tonight she was quiet, contemplative.
To break the odd silence, Max asked Sam if she wanted to grab a beer at the French Outpost. The Outpost was a campus bar that served French fries, beignets, Monte Cristo sandwiches, and Belgian beers in bottles with French labels. Sam nodded an assent and mouthed an almost imperceptible, “Yes.” They dressed quickly and, with a short stop in the dorm's respective men's and women’s bathrooms, they departed for the bar.
The Outpost was about halfway between the bus station and Max’s room. On a Friday night approaching eleven, it was pretty crowded and busy, but a couple left one of the booths just as Max and Sam arrived. They snagged the table and flagged a waiter down to get an order in before the kitchen closed. Max wanted a pint of Guinness, and Sam asked for some poutine and a glass of the house red. With the exception of expressing surprise at getting a table so easily and placing her order, Sam remained quiet. Max wondered if he had done something wrong. This was the longest Sam had been around him and not said anything.
The drinks arrived quickly, and the poutine soon after. The waiter gave them two small plates and placed the poutine between them. It was a house specialty and meant to be shared. Sam continued to be quiet. Normally, between bites, they would talk about what they had done during the week, what friends they had seen or talked to, and how fucked up the world was. But Sam’s silence continued. Oh, she nodded as Max talked. She moved her head up or sideways, answering yes or no when Max asked her direct questions. But mostly, she was silent.
Drinks finished and the food eaten, the waiter brought them their bill to move them along. Got to turn over those tables on a busy Friday night. Just like that, they walked back to the dorm, in the cold, under that star-filled sky, in silence. After another quick trip to their respective bathrooms to brush their teeth, they rested side-by-side in Max’s bed. Sam wore one of Max’s t-shirts and nothing else. Max wore only a rake’s smile. They made love again.
They lay there on the bed, the sheets and blankets wrapped around them in the disorganized fashion of passion’s recent embraces. Only a soft fleece blanket was pulled up over their now naked bodies. Max’s arm rested behind Sam’s shoulders. Small speakers played jazz. The mellow sax was punctuated by the random clanging of the dorm’s old steam radiators. Max had lit an incense cone in the little carved Buddha that sat atop his dresser.
Max decided to gently probe the silence. "So what’s up? You are quiet as you have ever been since I have known you. I don’t think you have ever gone through a whole evening with so few words since we met back when you were saying,“Meal ticket please.”
Sam shifted slightly and her now bare shoulder moved a little further up against Max. Her head turned just slightly further away from him. It appeared she was looking at the flat white ceiling when she began, " Do you ever wonder what you will be thinking 40 years from now? I mean when you are sixty-two and looking back at your life? Do you think you will feel like you have made the right choices so far? Are there things you should change, or we should change?”
Max pulled his head up to look directly at Sam’s face and eyes. He was concerned about whatever was troubling her. Max wasn’t concerned about the two of them. He was pretty sure in his mind at least, that their relationship was rock solid.
Max responded, “Sam, what’s up? Where is this coming from? I mean, I do think about what happens next. I am hoping one of these interviews I am doing will pan out. It is a tough job market. But I got the grades and I had an excellent internship last summer, so I feel I will be okay. I am pretty sure the chair of my department will write me a favorable letter. But what I will be thinking 40 years from now? No, I am not focused on that at all. I picked my career path long ago, probably in 5th grade when Ms. Deavers, my math teacher, told me I had an engineer's mind. Since then, I have been focused on exactly what I am doing now. Are your parents getting to you? Is it your job? I mean, some of the histories of those kids that you have hinted at are pretty dark, scary even. Do you want to do something else?”
Sam settled back and turned her face toward Max, smiling a little bit. “Max, you and I are so different. I have never known what I wanted to be. I guess I was just hoping the wind would carry me someplace good. I don’t know what is going on. I like my work. I think helping kids is really my calling or some part of it. I don’t know if I want to be a care assistant forever. Maybe it is just the constant questions from my folks and their frustration with me being at the house. Max, this isn’t about you. I really do love you."
Max looked at Sam with all the gentleness and understanding his heart contained. " And I love you too."
Sam shifted her position again, but Max was okay with it. Sam dropped her naked leg between his unclothed limbs, and her toes rubbed his. She continued, "I just don’t know what I will do about where I am living because at the rate I am going, I will be a prisoner in that house for a long time. Max quickly answered, "We’ll figure it out."
Sam, at that moment, slid her hand down Max’s torso and whispered, "I guess we will." The conversation stopped there. Bodies shifted, and the night became the joyous thing nights are supposed to be. Sam never returned to the topic the next day. For that day, they did the normal things you do at the edge of a campus. You scan through used vinyl. You eat at Taco Bell. You walk through the campus’s memorial gardens. Sam seemed much like herself to Max. She talked, she laughed, she told a joke or two.
On Sunday morning, they went out for brunch and drank fancy coffee drinks while reading a fat newspaper. On that Sunday evening, under another clear sky, Sam and Max walked together back to the bus.
Max and Sam waited for thirty minutes in an old, converted DQ for her ride. The bus to the city and its suburbs was late. They made small talk. In particular, they remembered when the station was a Dairy Queen and how this particular Sunday night run always ran late. At different moments, each of them got up and stared out the window into the blackness, scanning for the bus's lights. Eventually, it arrived, and Sam boarded, her backpack slung over her left shoulder.
A few minutes after the Trailways bus pulled away, rolling partway over the curb cut, belching diesel fumes, and grinding gears, Max lit a cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he shook involuntarily from the chill air. He had waved goodbye even though he couldn’t see Sam through the bus's tinted windows. He stood unmoving, staring at the bus’s running lights as they faded into the distance on the way to the interstate. Inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs, he began his ‘brisk’ walk to his room.
After Sam boarded the bus home despite her promise to see him the next weekend, Max heard from Sam exactly once. He had called and written, but her parents said she was not in and there were no return posts. It almost killed Max. His heart ached, and he was wracked with self-doubt. Things seemed so right, so perfect. Had he done something wrong? Had he missed a sign that Sam needed help?
No call ever came. Her parents clearly started screening his calls because they never answered when he rang, and eventually he gave up.
Some months later, Max received a postcard from New Mexico. It was the only communication after that cold March night. The postcard didn’t say much. Sam wrote that she hoped Max was well. She said she would call when she got settled somewhere. The front of the postcard was simply a picture of a large cactus in the desert. There were no words that said, “Move on.” Eventually, he did. There was nothing that signaled it was over. But it was.
It was only many months after Sam ghosted him that Max really moved on. He had taken a job in a state south of where he had grown up. He liked his work, and they liked him. Sam, one Thursday night, met Trisha in the grocery store checkout lane. She was blonde, short, and cute. They joked about what was in each other’s cart and the tabloid headlines near the register. On a whim, Max asked her out.
One date led to another. It took a couple of years, but they eventually married and had kids. Trisha had demanded that Max quit smoking before she would consider anything long-term. So he quit. For a time, they were happy. But then they weren’t. Max divorced Trisha when he discovered she was sleeping with one of the Cub Scout Den’s dads.
Trisha hadn’t asked for much in the settlement. He kept the house, and they shared custody equally. She remarried to that Cub Scout guy, a doctor. Max didn’t have to sell the house because he could afford the monthly nut. He did well at the engineering firm. He had become a very young partner. Twice burned by relationships, Max took time away from dating and intimacy.
Hidden in the Last Kiss
Pulling into the driveway, Max jumped out of the car and walked in through the side door. He set his briefcase on the desk next to his laptop. Max knew he would be working through the weekend. Hey the Lexus and this four thousand square foot home on an acre lot would not pay for themselves.
Dropping his jacket at the end of the couch Max took off his tie, kicked off his wingtips and poured himself a drink from one of five single malts in his liquor cabinet. He smiled as the peaty brown liquid hit the solitary ice cube.
As he glanced around he wondered if this was where he was meant to be, if these were the things he was supposed to have. He hummed a few bars of Talking Heads Burning Down the House. Max wasn’t if it was the wrong song but he was sure it was the right band.
The house was quiet. The kids were at Trisha’s for the weekend. They would return late Sunday night. Next week was his week to be the cook, the scullery maid, the drill instructor, the school taxi and the hockey dad. Luckily both boys are on the same team this year. Trish was handling transport to this Saturday’s practice and Sunday’s game.
Max would start this weekend like he had started most dad only weekends over the past month. He clicked through the menus on his smart TV until he reached YouTube. He then worked his way to a Ted talk title called The Future is Waiting for Us to Care.
Care's female speaker was dressed in a stylish professional suit. She had written a book with the same title and it had bubbled around just off the best seller lists for a few months. Her credentials were her book, her MSW degree and teaching at a California school. The talk focused on how our methods of caring for at-risk children have failed and what she saw as the path forward. Drink in hand Max settled in and watched the video from start to end. The speaker was Samantha Hargraves. Sam. His Sam.
One of Max's college friends who remembered Max and Sam as a couple sent Max the URL. There was nothing in the email that suggested who the speaker was. Instead, it said simply that this was a meaningful talk and Max should watch it. Max was gobsmacked when he opened the URL at work and saw that the speaker was an older but still beautiful Sam.
After the first viewing Max had googled Sam’s name and the book's name. Each had its own short Wiki page.
According to her Wiki Sam almost immediately after ghosting Max drifted west to where some relatives lived. She got a job in the Colorado’s public adolescent care system. While working in the system, she completed her Master of Social Work at the University of Denver. Judging by the dates in the post she headed west almost immediately after their last weekend together.
Sam's book came out two years ago. The Ted talk was a little over a year old. According to the Wiki Sam had never married. Currently she splits her time between being an instructor in a social work program, writing and lecturing.
Max settled in to watch the talk as he had done many times. His mind reeled from seeing her. This older Sam still had the various habits and tics that made her who she was. Her right hand reached up twice during the video to move her hair. It was the same casual motion she used when they were together. As he watched she brushed her now shorter hair back. Her half laugh with which she often punctuated her sentences back at university showed up a couple of times when she expressed her hope for change in the child welfare system.
After the first couple of viewings Max searched Google for more personal details about Sam. He found her email at the school where she taught. Using a dubious ‘search someone free site' he came up with a possible phone number. He tried several of those sites and was pretty sure of her home address.
But he did not write to her. Max did email her. Nor did he call her. Max instead remembered the weeks and months following the last kiss at the bus station. He remembered how in those weeks and months his thoughts crashed from side to side in his brain and his guts were in perpetual knots. Max had only gotten through those last months of school because of his drive to be an ‘engineer’ with a capital E.
And Max remembered the last kiss, a kiss he did not know would be the final punctuation mark in the Sam and Max story. Yes he kept returning to that kiss at the bus station. That night Max carried Sam’s backpack to the depot for her. Max set it beside her as she dug around in her purse for a bit to find the return portion of her ticket. When she grabbed the printed ticket she held it up with a look that said. "Viola."
Sam had then wrapped her arms around Max and kissed him long and deep. As Max recalled, the clinch and the kiss lasted for what seemed like a minute. He remembered Sam’s perfume's vanilla scent. He remembered the moisture on her lips.
The kiss ended with Sam promising to see Max next weekend. When they separated Sam looked away. The kiss seemed passionate but Max knew it was lacking something. The kiss had all the physical components of passion but Max sensed it was emotionally empty. The last kiss at the bus station was long but Sam seemed distracted and almost absent.
The moment of that kiss encapsulated their past intensity. Max realized in retrospect that the kiss also heralded their inevitable separation. Clearly Sam knew it then but Max didn't. Sam had hidden well the finality of their last kiss. She had hidden well the death of their relationship. Max still didn’t understand why.
Max clicked the TV off and took a long sip of the amber liquid in his glass. He would need food before he downed any more Scotch. He rose and walked to the refrigerator, opened it and stared into the middle distance.
Max’s mind kept returning to the bus station. Instead of kissing the younger Sam, his mind turned to the professional Sam from the Ted talk. His mind stripped out the background of the bus station’s plastic seats and lockers. In his mind he created a neutral space with a kiss that lingered. It seemed to be all that mattered. But even in this phantom space the kiss, while filled with warmth and familiarity, also contained an off note marking the silent acknowledgment that their paths were diverging.
Max long ago realized that sometimes goodbyes aren't spoken and last kisses aren’t announced. He also knew goodbyes often linger in the space between a touch and a downward glance. He had also learned you don’t always get answers to those questions that burn in your heart.
The kiss at the bus depot had profound weight, more poignant than words can convey. In spite of his recent focus on the video, Max had quietly accepted the change that had occurred so long ago. Tonight would be the last time he watched that video.
A single perfect paragraph, this is what I long to create.Imagine an hour (or three) spent at the keyboard crafting the exquisite first seven lines of a short story.My verb tenses will all be right.I want the various plurals to be proper.In essence what I want is to create something which is without glaring error. When I am done, I will have left words and punctuation so precise the reader is completely drawn in and captured by the narrative. I want the words in that first paragraph to be so good that any reader would know what follows will just blow them away.
But.
But I will never write such a paragraph. Why? Because I was a fuck up in grade school and high school. Sometimes I can mine a vein of memory or experience to open up a quite interesting premise, but the mechanics of my writing just drives readers away. Probably the only grammar that has stuck with me is what I learned in my 3 years of high school Latin. I remember the nominative and the ablative, I remember the pluperfect. So what? If I had have paid more attention to my seventh and eight grade English instructors I would be a writing threat. Sadly, the style and structure with which the ancient Romans captured their thoughts do not translate well to the modern rules of writing.
Note well I have read perfect paragraphs and pages of perfect paragraphs strung together. Ken Kesey’s first page or two of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, just perfect. The last paragraph of The Remains of the Dayis so unbelievable in perfection. I think the latter is in many ways more perfect for it pulls together a hundred threads of thought and feeling that were loose throughout the narrative and ties them all up with a big bright bow of crisp carefully selected words.
Yeah, I want to write a perfect paragraph.
Here is what I believe is an example of several perfect paragraphs strung together. These are the first three paragraphs of James Hiltion's Goodbye Mr. Chips.
When you are getting on in years (but not ill, of course), you get very sleepy at times, and the hours seem to pass like lazy cattle moving across a landscape. It was like that for Chips as the autumn term progressed and the days shortened till it was actually dark enough to light the gas before call-over. For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past; and well he might, for he lived at Mrs. Wickett's, just across the road from the School. He had been there more than a decade, ever since he finally gave up his mastership; and it was Brookfield far more than Greenwich time that both he and his landlady kept. "Mrs. Wickett," Chips would sing out, in that jerky, high-pitched voice that had still a good deal of sprightliness in it, "you might bring me a cup of tea before prep, will you?"
When you are getting on in years it is nice to sit by the fire and drink a cup of tea and listen to the school bell sounding dinner, call-over, prep, and lights-out. Chips always wound up the clock after that last bell; then he put the wire guard in front of the fire, turned out the gas, and carried a detective novel to bed. Rarely did he read more than a page of it before sleep came swiftly and peacefully, more like a mystic intensifying of perception than any changeful entrance into another world. For his days and nights were equally full of dreaming.
He was getting on in years (but not ill, of course); indeed, as Doctor Merivale said, there was really nothing the matter with him. "My dear fellow, you're fitter than I am," Merivale would say, sipping a glass of sherry when he called every fortnight or so. "You're past the age when people get these horrible diseases; you're one of the few lucky ones who're going to die a really natural death. That is, of course, if you die at all. You're such a remarkable old boy that one never knows." But when Chips had a cold or when east winds roared over the fenlands, Merivale would sometimes take Mrs. Wickett aside in the lobby and whisper: "Look after him, you know. His chest... it puts a strain on his heart. Nothing really wrong with him— only anno domini, but that's the most fatal complaint of all, in the end."
When I attended the Michigan State Universe in the mid-1970s the world was a different place. We still had hope in the future. We still held the notion dear that we as a people were evolving toward a nation where gender and race would no longer be limiting conditions. We fully believed that literature’s best moments were still ahead. Clearly this was evidenced by the high quality shown by the writers of letters to Penthousemagazine.
On one occasion several of my fellow MSU students and I pursued a public reading of one of these great works of art. We did this on a warm and sunny fall afternoon in the public lounge area of our dormitory. Our simple goal was to promote this uniquely evolving form of great literature. We just didn’t understand how the Pulitzer literary prize committee failed to acknowledge the talent of these great writers year after year.
Letters on library stacks assignations were particularly interesting to us because we undergraduates were for the most part were barred from the research stacks. At the Michigan State Universe undergraduates were expressly forbidden to be in the ‘research stacks’, the place where scholarly journals and quarterly publications were all neatly arranged in university bound color coded volumes. Titles like The University of Alberta Journal of Hydrological Data Assessment were arranged neatly in row after row floor after floor. Only serious scholars were allowed to wander there among that mixture of thickly bound material and dust, each title having its own unique smell.
Because of the serious reverence for the knowledge in these books very few undergraduate students got there. (There was a back way in but that is for a different story). Master and doctoral degree candidates were allowed to roam these oft vacant realms. Decrepit professors could cruise up and down these aisles. Their numbers were sparse and the stacks remained very quiet day after day, week after week. A pencil left on the floor in an aisle separating journals could remain there untouched for days.
It was the near vacant nature of the storage space for these learned treatises that gave rise to the stack assignation stories. These stories followed a pattern. First, the narrator would specify why they would be in the stacks, always stated to be a deep and scholarly interest. Next the teller of the tale (always a male) would find out that someone else was in the nearly deserted area. Given it was Penthouse the writer would find a comely member of the opposite sex lingering between the rows of books. Of course, the person discovered would be observed doing something suggestive. I won’t dwell on the wild variations of the suggestive activities but assume it something like leaning over a sorting cart in a short skirt exposing lace fringed silk undergarments. Invariably this would lead to a discussion of gymnastic sex worthy of the pliable nature of Olga Korbut’s limbs.
Well, there we were in our mixed gender, mixed race group, sitting around the western lounge of Mayo Hall. As I have said we decided to promote public awareness of this great literary form through a public reading. We would accomplish this by handing around an open Penthouse neatly concealed in another mass market publication like Time. Each of the 12 or so of us would read a single paragraph out loud continuing to hand the magazine to the person to our right until the letter concluded.
The first people to read got off relatively unscathed in the endeavor. The first two or three paragraph of these letters, and they were long missives, were ones describing the writer’s work assignment, the locale of the action within the rows of dusty cobweb covered books, and the pink silk underwear of the soon to be member of Olympic fornication squad.
Readers four through ten got the yeoman’s task of reading the descriptions of the sexual athleticism of the writer and his brave cohort. Readers four through ten also got to use the wild and varied adjectives and adverbs contained in the tale. Moist, sweaty and wildly are about the safest of those words to recount here. These determined orators also got to use the action verbs like thrust, and all its variants, voicing them in stage voices that would have made Sir John Gielgud proud. Hand gestures would accompany the narration, mostly staging directions (although sometimes they would be graphic representations of particularly difficult to understand maneuvers outlined in the text of the letter).
I did mention that this was a public reading. I did mention this was in a ground floor lounge of a dormitory. What I did not mention was that this ground floor’s suites of rooms had been occupied that year by a bunch of clean-shaven, short haired young men whose purpose, at that moment in their collective lives, was to proselytize to the world at large what they believed was the proper route to salvation. To those who went to university in the 1970s these were the gents who stood out on the corners in center campus handing out small green copies of their sacred religious texts one day a term. These were folks who did not drink, dance or smoke. They also did not believe in having sex standing up because it could lead to dancing.
Now as reader seven was in a grave and serious tone describing a sexual maneuver that had about the same difficulty as a gymnast performing a double salto tucked with two full twists, a stranger approached the circle unnoticed by most. The listeners were really engaged in listening to the reading, enrapt perhaps. The telling had captured their late teen/early twenties minds. Their heart rates were elevated and there may have been stirrings in their loins. The listeners were hanging on every word that was spoken with faster and shorter breaths.
At this moment, when the narrator was describing two people hanging nude from what must have been an industrial grade light fixture, a young clean-cut gentleman continued his approach from the monasterial region of the dormitory. The reader having seen the approaching stranger stopped his reading midsentence and closed the Time magazine thus hiding the Penthouse and its racy cover. The excited listeners looked confused but then they saw the approaching stranger too.
Coming to a halt dead center in the half circle of literary enthusiasts, this gentleman (let us call him Barry) produced a religious text from under his arm. Barry opened his sacred book and asked if the listeners if they would mind if he read what he believed were the holy words related directly to what he saw as a universal plan of salvation. All twelve pairs of eyes focused on the floor. Indistinct mummers were heard but there was no overt or unambiguous refusal to Barry’s proposal. Taking this as acquiescence, Barry spoke with passion. As he spoke the blood that had been pooling in specific places among the twelve listeners dissipated. Pulses slowed and breathing returned to regular rates. Barry’s stump speech was short and sweet, maybe 3 minutes maximum. At the end he gently closed his book, thanked the listeners and walked off with a strong steady stride away heading for the lounge of the east side.
When Barry was gone the then reader, who had quietly closed the Time/Penthouse combination left the magazines closed. Giggles came gently at first. Then came sheepish and guilty laughter. Then people began falling out of their chairs with guttural laughter and flushed red faces. I think Barry’s departing comment that the part that burns most in hell is the part that you sin with struck a chord with us.
We did not return to our public promotion of literary talent on this particular day. Maybe it was shame, maybe it was guilt, but we just didn't pick up where we left off. Instead, we wandered on to other activities like campus movies and cruising through the local downtown looking for posters to decorate our rooms. Some people might have picked up incense or market spice tea. Others wandered down to the river to feed the ducks.
Penthouse’s letters never received the literary plaudits we felt they truly deserved. I think we can only blame ourselves for not further promoting public awareness through additional public readings.
