Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program.”
Now, you need to understand something about the way our household is organized — or rather, isn’t. We’re very good about hanging on to Important Papers such as bills, insurance records, and so on. We’re equally (and regrettably) good about hanging on to Less Important Papers, such as magazines from 1994 or so. And then there are Truly Unimportant Papers — political-candidate promotional flyers, the bi-weekly mailing from the local swimming-pool company which doesn’t know that our property will never be suitable for a swimming pool, cheap 10-page ads from department stores in the next county, and so on — which go more or less immediately into the recycling bin.
This letter from our block captain fell into a fourth category. It has no formal, capitalized name, this category. It’s a category which might be loosely described as “papers which may at some point turn out to be important, but we really hope they don’t because [fill in reason], but maybe they’ll just disappear on their own accord and thereby relieve us of further responsibility for possessing them.”
And you know what? By golly, such papers eventually do wander off someplace, their tails between their legs. I imagine a whole auditorium of them, somewhere beyond the pale of imagination, eternally whimpering in neglect.
One of the hammer blows which Tropical Storm/Depression Fay landed upon our area was the pair of trees (not just one, as I’d thought earlier) which fell over in a neighbor’s yard. One simply lay the width of the front yard. The other, even bigger, remained propped on a corner of the (remarkably undamaged) house for a few days following the storm’s passing. I told The Missus I couldn’t imagine how the tree could be removed without punching through a wall or the roof. “They’ll have to use a crane,” I said.
In the event, no crane was required.
Three guys drove up in a plain white pickup. In the back of the truck were an assortment of chainsaws, about the length of an arm, and a couple of loooooooong orange-nylon ropes. The latter, they draped over the limbs of a nearby undamaged tree. One end of each was wrapped and tied around the upper end of the tree; the other ends were affixed to the rear of the pickup truck. All they had to do was drive the truck forward, and up would come the tree.
Needless to say, this operation — in a neighborhood so pedestrian that most people are in bed by 9 p.m. — drew a little knot of onlookers. We gathered in the cul-de-sac, discussing theories of geometry and the dynamics of nylon, the concepts of levers and pulleys, as though we actually had any idea how this would actually work. It seemed obvious that as soon as the tree was lifted off the roof, it would swing back and, I don’t know, take out the entire north wall of the second floor.
Into the mini-crowd suddenly wandered the block captain. He didn’t say anything at first, so I rather hoped he was simply assessing the risks and, perhaps, constructing in his head the preferred evacuation route when the guy turned the truck’s ignition key.
Not so. He was just waiting for a break in the conversation.
I felt a timid tap on my shoulder. “John,” he said, “did you ever receive my letter…?”
At that point i knew I was doomed. After all, of course we received his letter. I even remembered receiving it. Between gaps among his words, I even fancied I could hear, in the distance, the bleating of a small lost white sheet of paper.
So anyway, what I told him was that after the tree thing was over, I’d go back home, find (gulp) his letter — which included his email address — and send him my own email address and our phone numbers.
(All of which would have happened, by the way, except that there is no longer such a sheet of paper. So I just typed up the information he wanted, printed it out, stuck it in an envelope, and then put the envelope in his mailbox.)
The conversation turned to other matters, in an attempt to relieve the suspense as we waited for the truck to start moving. Few of us had ever really spent time talking to one another, so naturally one of the first orders of business was: What do you do for a living?
I said, “I’m a computer programmer. A Web developer.” (Both of which are true. I don’t typically just flat-out tell people I’m an aspiring author, or perhaps re-author would be more accurate. Other aspiring authors will understand.)
“Ooooh,” several people said. And before anyone else could jump in, the block captain took advantage of their slow-footedness to buttonhole me himself.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “See, I just got a new computer and I’m trying to transfer all my contacts from the old Outlook Express list to the new one and it’s just, not, working…”
I was reminded of this story this afternoon, when I came across a link from the Froogville blog (over there on the right, under “Writers to Be Read”). Froog had included the image at the top of this RAMH post in a post of his own, saying he’d found it at his “new favourite website, FrostFireZoo.” Given the image, and given Froog’s endorsement, naturally I had to visit FrostFireZoo myself.
Which was where I found the image below, and cracked up:
marta says
Whenever someone tells me what they do for a living, I try to make sure I do not then make any statement beginning with “Oh, I’ve got a…”
Usually when I tell people I teach ESL, they say, “Oh, I didn’t know you could speak Spanish.” They are mystified that I don’t speak Spanish.
Either that or they say they’ll have to watch their grammar around me.
And like you I almost never tell anyone I’m an aspiring writer or artist. My mother-in-law likes to introduce me that way and it is a good conversation stopper. “Really? Have you published anything?”
“Um, no.”
—-
John says
@marta – Wait until you are published. The questions become even trickier to field w/out feeling like you still aren’t a “real” author: “Do you have an agent?” “Is this a publisher/agent I’ve ever heard of?” “What other books of yours might I like?” And my favorite: “Say, I’ve written a book too! Do you think you could take a look at it, maybe give me some pointers, introduce me to a few people?”
The last isn’t too bad — it’s flattering, at one level (and if anyone who ever asked me those questions is reading this and offended, I apologize). But it’s also humiliating: it forces you to realize you honestly don’t have much to offer another aspiring writer, other than encouragement. Any advice based on your own experience must be taken with a grain of salt, because it’s only your experience.
I never knew that about ESL teachers — that you might not actually need a second language of your own, in order to pair you up with language-appropriate students. I would’ve been one of the people who asked you to say something in Spanish, Korean, or whatever. Duh!
We should start a new movement: WSA — Writing as a Second Art. You would certainly have numerous options as your first choice (the paper stuff, the photography). And I, well, I guess I could always fall back on the computer stuff.