"The Truth"

Sam Pickering

Description

This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a pro-fessional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row.  They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”

Table of Contents

    1 And So It Goes

  18 On Again, On Again

  42 End of the Roads

  71 Reading at Eighty

108 Reading at One Hundred and 

Twenty

145 Who Am I Now?

153 Bail

170 California Christmas

196 Suicide by Pen

212 Afterword

223 About the Author

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Essays
• Biography
• Form
• Memoir
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781956440287
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Other books by Sam Pickering

Essay Collections A Continuing Education The Right Distance May Days Still Life Let It Ride Trespassing The Blue Caterpillar Living to Prowl Deprived of Unhappiness A Little Fling The Last Book The Best of Pickering Indian Summer Autumn Spring Journeys Dreamtime The Splendour Falls All My Days Are Saturdays Happy Vagrancy One Grand, Sweet Song Parade’s End The World Was My Garden, Too Terrible Sanity The Gate in the Garden Wall

Travel Walkabout Year Waltzing the Magpies Edinburgh Days A Tramp’s Wallet

Literary Studies The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785-1850 John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England Moral Instruction and Fiction for Children, 1749-1820

Teaching Letters to a Teacher

Memoir A Comfortable Boy

Copyright © 2023 by Sam Pickering All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065

Author Photograph: Eliza Pickering Cover Design: Kimberly Davis Cover image: “The Piper of Dreams” by Estella Louisa Michaela Canziani (1887-1964)

ISBN: 978-1-956440-27-0 Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-956440-28-7 Ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937237

Dedication

I have dedicated most of my books to Vicki. Without her I wouldn’t be “me.” But amid the pages and the briar patches of words she often vanishes, and I regret that. She is a wife and mother, a person akin to the ideal woman Wordsworth described as “bright with something of angelic light.” Yet she is a heck of a lot more. On her dresser is a voodoo doll. It’s not a New Orleans or Port-au-Prince doll, but a Storrs doll, domesticated and rectangular, five inches wide and six tall, a pocket recycled from a gray soiled apron. Sketched on each side of the pocket is a box-shaped man with stick arms and legs, topped by a square head. Along the ribs of one man appears the name Putin, on the other Trump. Every morning Vicki sticks two hairpins into each figure. “You can’t predict what’ll happen,” she says. I think chicken feet would be more effective than hairpins or since this is New England maybe vegan wishbones made out of gluten and tofu. But then the doll is Vicki’s, not mine, as in truth this and my other books are hers, too. So, for the last time let me write, “For Vicki, with love.”

And So It Goes

On Again, On Again

End of the Roads

Reading at Eighty

Table of Contents

Reading at One Hundred and Twenty

Who Am I Now?

Bail

California Christmas

Suicide by Pen

Afterword

About the Author

And So It Goes

Last Thursday I mailed the revised manuscript of my final book to a press. My writing years had been long and good, “albeit unexpected,” I wrote Mike a college classmate. “I intend to sit in a chair at the edge of the driveway and on sunny days doze through hours waking up occasionally to identify birds on the feeder. My hands and lap will be empty, and I won’t worry about wind scattering papers across the yard.” On Tuesday Mike answered my note. “Given all the books you have written, it makes me sad to hear that you have written your last book. Please remember what mighty things 80-year-olds can still do. For instance, Goethe taught himself Greek when he was 80. Too bad he died at 81.” “What a good first paragraph for an essay,” I thought as I read Mike’s letter. “But I have moved on,” I told Vicki later. “Maybe,” Vicki said, “but you are still sitting in your study and haven’t migrated to the drive. Before you hop over the blank wall at the end of your days, you’ll pull a pencil out of your long white robe and scribble something on the bricks. You will never be pencil-less. Friends will supply you with writing material long after they move into condos in Skeleton Park.” Vicki was right. The next week, Bob, an academic friend, wrote me. He said that I “owed it to the profession” to write a book describing my graduate school years at Princeton. “It would delight. You had so much fun.” I “loved” graduate school. The years were rich with books and colorful anecdotes. Nevertheless I demurred. “I knew too many people too well,” I told Bob. The decent autobiographer fabricates place and characters. He fences his pages and refuses to let actual people cross the margins, even if Time has transformed them into pale revenants. I didn’t want to disappoint Bob so I let him down with an anecdote, asking if he recalled Sue Jernigan. Sue was a mathematician and left graduate school after two years. She did not make a strong impression, so to jog Bob’s memory I described Sue in some detail. She was short and “a little dumpy,” I wrote. Her hair was black and curly, and the curls were plastered so tightly against her forehead they looked like fiddleheads. Even on hot days she wore calf-high white plastic boots. After abandoning graduate studies, she became a CPA, eventually rising to “head financial honcho” of a company that manufactured dental tools, items like scalers and picks, mouth mirrors and saliva ejectors. Sue didn’t marry and died at sixty-five. She invested her money with mathematical precision and was well heeled. Four years ago on a cruise in the Caribbean I met her niece and heir. “On every island,” the woman told me, “I drink a Mojito or three in memory of Aunty Sue. Her money made this cruise possible. As soon as her big bucks appeared in my bank account, I stopped teaching 2nd grade, sold my bungalow, and started traveling practically living on cruise ships.” “I loved Aunty and I’m grateful to her,” the woman added after a good snort, “and I always leave a heeltap at the bottom of my glass just in case she’s thirsty and is hanging around out of sight.” Bob answered my letter. He said that despite “the plethora of details,” he wasn’t sure he remembered Sue. He asked if she’d been an undergraduate at Long Island University. Sue and her boozy niece were fabrications. I’m glad Bob didn’t remember her. If he had, he would clearly have been on the way to Ga-Ga Land. No matter how writers struggle to type “The End” on last books, many are doomed to fail. Life does not stop hammering raw hours into anecdotes. Recently I had my eyes tested. The optometrist was experienced and competent. She was also garrulous and sensible. Halfway down the scroll of my medications, she paused and said, “Lupron. My father took that after the doctor removed his prostate. How do you

take it?” “A shot,” I said. “Where do you get the shot?” she asked. “In my behind,” I answered. “Father got his in the stomach,” she replied, “but they didn’t do any good. The cancer went to his brain, and he passed.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t be,” she said. “The last year of his life was terrible, and it’s good he’s gone. I don’t know where he is, but any time or place would be better than here and now.” “What did you say then?” Vicki asked when I described the examination. “I didn’t say anything. I just kept staring into the phoropter.” Like strangers, friends endlessly mold the clay of unplanned hours into anecdotes. Shortly after I replied to Bob, Savely wrote me. Savely taught botany at a college in Ohio for forty years. He retired the same year I retired. Instead of continuing to explore wood and field, he hibernated. As a result, dealing with ordinary academic things gradually became almost impossible. “Sam,” he began, “last week I received an email from a former student.” “You are a treasure to this world,” Savely’s old student wrote, “and every time I think about what you taught me about life and trees, I smile and am thankful. I will never forget you.” “Sam, throughout my career I prided myself on honesty,” Savely wrote, “but I don’t have any idea who this man was or is. Must I tell him that I have completely forgotten him? You’ve written books. Tell me what to say to him.” The most important skill a teacher should have is the ability to lie convincingly. Decency, compassion, and ease of living rest on the necessity of lying. Before entering a classroom, every beginning teacher should purchase a box of crayons, the biggest one containing 120 different colors. He should use these to color truths making them acceptable and kindly, transforming them into life-enhancing lies. “Students are children, and adults who write their old teachers have regressed and are momentarily children again,” I wrote Savely. “Thank your correspondent profusely. Tell him, and use my words, that his letter ‘meant the world’ to you. Say that you’d forgotten how much you adored teaching until you received his letter. Tell him his words brought tears to your eyes. End by assuring him that ‘of course’ you remember him and ‘with great affection and admiration.’” “It’s a wonder you didn’t advise Savely to fill an eyedropper with water and sprinkle false tears on his reply,” Vicki said. To be truthful, I considered doing so, but what’s appropriate for me would have been too much for Savely, and I had already elbowed him a long way out of his comfort zone. At dinner that night Vicki asked if I remembered the song “Heartaches by the Number” in which the singer lamented having troubles by the score. Friends, she said, won’t let you disappear into silence. They’ll ask for advice, urge you to write more books, and you will oblige them. She said I resembled the monk in the old story who was addicted to chess. When a bald- headed angel asked what he’d do on learning that a meteor was hurtling through the sky and would destroy the earth in five minutes, the monk replied, “I’d move my bishop to D-5.” “Why a bald-headed angel?” I asked. “That’s for you to figure out on the page,” Vicki said. “Forget the dark ages at Princeton. Let your light shine in the present and write a book compounded out of equal portions of self-help and fiddle- faddle.” I mulled Vicki’s suggestion for a couple of days. It was intriguing and seductive. Giving advice is easier than receiving it. For my part I have rarely paid attention to unsolicited advice. I think most advice presumptuous and more irritating than poison ivy even when applied with a slather of lubricating words. Only when caught in the tightening coils of the prolegomenon to a tedious didactic lecture have I asked advice. I did so not to learn but to force concision upon the speaker and end the conversation. “What do you think is the best course of action? Put it in a nutshell,” I