Time to Remember

Lloyd C. Douglas

Description

The book is an autobiographical account of the author's early life and his family. He intended to write a second volume covering his ministerial career and his life as a novelist but he died not long after this one was published.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Literary Figures

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774640111
• Langue: English

Extrait

Time to Remember
by Lloyd C. Douglas

Firstpublished in 1951
Thisedition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria,BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
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All rightsreserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrievalsystem, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quotebrief passages in a review.
TIME TO REMEMBER
by Lloyd C. Douglas

To my three grandsons,
Arthur, John,
and Douglas Dawson
Doctor’s Orders or
Why I Am Doing This
When I completed The Big Fisherman , a year ago, Iannounced that I would never attempt another novel, a statementthat won for me the first applause I had ever heard frommy more ruthless critics.
I was very tired. The long story had occupied my mind forfive years. I was seventy-one, badly crippled with arthritis,sick-abed much of the time; and when, on the last page, SimonPeter died, I half envied him.
For a few weeks I rejoiced in my freedom. I had been outof one novel and into another for twenty years. There wasnothing more that I wanted to say. Now I would have plentyof leisure to read many neglected books and write to manyneglected friends.
But my retirement hasn’t been as much fun as I had hoped. Ihave had more time to reflect upon my aches and pains. I amrestless and unhappy. It has been hard on my relatives toowho have tried unsuccessfully to entertain me.
My physician now advises that if I don’t want to go to bedfor keeps, to say nothing of the risk of driving my loved onescrazy, I had better get back to work: I must write something,anything! My family and my publishers have suggested a bookof reminiscences.
It had never occurred to me that I might do such a thing. Mylife story lacks drama. I was never in battle, never in jail. Iwas never a crusader, never headed a movement, and wasequally unskillful at swinging a gavel or a golf club. I was notan athlete nor much of a scholar. I never sought a public officeand nobody ever suggested that I should.
If this writing should turn out to be a book; and if you shouldbuy or borrow it, you cannot complain that you weren’twarned in advance that it was not written to entertain, educate,or inspire anybody. It is simply an exercise in occupationaltherapy. It is what the doctor ordered.
The Author

1. My Papa
My father, Alexander Jackson Douglas,was fifty when I was born. He had lived longer than mostmen of his years, having been a farmer, a schoolmaster, acollege student, a lawyer, a State Senator; and, when we firstmet, a rural preacher.
He had also sired a large family and was a grandfather tochildren older than I, so that by the time we of the secondcrop came along little kids were no novelty and certainly notreat.
My younger brother and I were taught by our mama to callour father Papa, which we did, and continued to do until theend of his days.
Mama, too, who was his junior by more than a score of years,called him Papa, except on infrequent occasions of brief butbrisk annoyance when she addressed him as A.J. Mama wassincerely devoted to Papa but when she called him A.J. we all—includingA.J.—took to cover.
When I was a small boy all men in their fifties were elderly.It was not to any man’s advantage to appear youthful. Theworld had always been operated by and for old men and mypapa had been brought up in that tradition. In his youth allwork was done by hand. There was no power machinery.Even the horse-drawn conveyances and implements on thenorthern Ohio farm where Papa grew up were primitive. Grasswas cut with sickle and scythe, dried and cured into hay withhand rakes. The mowing machine, the hay-tedder, the grainharvester were yet to appear. Wheat was threshed on thebarn floor by the same kind of flail used in Egypt during thereign of the Pharaohs.
In the field of manufacture, a man who built wagons madethe whole wagon. To do that he had to be a draughtsman, acarpenter, a blacksmith, a wheelwright, a painter and a merchant.It required long experience to acquire so many skills.
This venerable wagon-maker was assisted by poorly paidapprentices who turned the grindstone, fired the forge, dressedthe lumber, and stood at the old fellow’s elbow, handing himsharpened chisels and dirty looks, and wishing him dead.
The same conditions applied to all other varieties of employment.In the bank, in the store, on the farm, on the sea, inlegislative halls and professorial chairs, it was the old manwho paid the piper and called the tune. For economic reasons,then, it was important that a man should take on the appearanceand behavior of maturity as soon as possible. Youngstersin their late teens and early twenties grew beards.
When power machinery came into common use and youthfulagility was more in demand than seasoned experience, thebeards disappeared from the faces of all men who brought theirdexterity to market rather than their wisdom. But the statesmen,doctors, lawyers, bankers, teachers and preachers kepttheir whiskers for many years after the men in the mill haddisposed of theirs.
My papa had a clean-shaven upper lip but the rest of hisface was bearded and his beard was long and white. I onceasked my Aunt Nancy, Papa’s much younger sister, how oldhe was when he began to let it grow, and she couldn’t rememberhaving seen him without it.
Apparently it ran in his family to turn gray prematurely.Papa had a great shock of white hair which he kept until hisdeath at seventy-eight. Two of my four handsome half-brothers(all of them gone now) were noticeably gray in theirthirties. I envied them their distinguished appearance andhoped that I might share in this inheritance; but, unfortunately,most of my hair had fallen out by the time I was thirty-five,thanks to the influence of my grandfather Samuel Cassel who,according to usually reliable sources (I never met the good oldman personally) was bald as an egg, a report partially substantiatedby the fact that in the only daguerreotype we haveof him he wore a hat. Incidentally, this hat was dilapidated,hinting that Samuel had consented to an impromptu picture-takingby some journeyman photographer met at the villagetavern. Though my grandfather was dead long before theorganization of Alcoholics Anonymous, he could have qualifiedfor membership as he had quite a capacity for alcohol, andnobody could have been more anonymous.
But to return to my papa: he was five feet, eight and a halfinches in height and carried an average weight of two hundredpounds, some of it worn around the middle. He never owneda leather belt; but, had he used one, it would probably havemeasured about forty-four inches. Papa liked good food andtook very little physical exercise; and, as has been remarkedearlier, he had spent several years in the Indiana State Senate,an ideal place to acquire rotundity.
Papa was a good mixer and made friends quickly. He hadquite a talent for remembering names. His rather florid facewas easily lighted with an infectious smile. He had a winningvoice and people listened when he talked. He was a giftedstoryteller with an inexhaustible repertory of yarns appropriateto any occasion. Even as a little boy I was one of his mostappreciative fans. No matter how often he repeated a well-rememberedtale, I sat spellbound, for it was never told thesame way twice. Papa had an active imagination and couldhave been a successful novelist.
Among the most cherished memories of my childhood is therecollection of our small family clustered close around Papa’sfavorite rocking chair, of a winter’s evening, listening intentlyto the current installment of an adventure story serialized in The Youth’s Companion . This enchanted weekly arrived onFriday. By common consent, nobody tore off its wrapper untilsupper was over and the dishes had been put away. Then, inan ecstasy of anticipation, we waited while Papa deliberatelyopened the magazine and prepared to read. But there wasalways a torturing delay, for Papa would make a big thing ofpolishing his spectacles.
At the time, so urgent was my eagerness to get on with thestory, I felt that Papa, having had no responsibility for helpingwith the dishes, might at least have wiped his glasses. Manyyears later it dawned on me that his maddening tardiness tocome to our relief was a calculated ruse to whet our appetitefor the feast in store. Papa must have had an instinct for precisiontiming. He knew intuitively the priceless value ofsuspense in any form of dramatic entertainment.
In passing, let me record my belief that this capacity forcreating suspense in a story or play is a gift rather than anachievement. You either have it or you don’t. To secure andhold the reader’s or auditor’s attention it is necessary to worryhim about the outcome. He must be required to wait. Butsuspense, like garlic, can be overdone. As in the inflation ofa rubber balloon, there is a certain split-second when theblower, however ambitious to build up his balloon to a prodigioussize, had better stop blowing. The art of diviningexactly when to quit elaborating a joke or a crisis cannot belearned or taught unless the minstrel has been endowed bynature with this peculiar faculty for determining how muchmay prudently be spent on stage-setting. It is a special bequestlike the gift of absolute pitch or the uncanny ability of adeported cat to find her way home.
During the winter of 1887 Papa read Ben Hur to us. It wasthe first full-length novel I had encountered and it made a deepimpression on me. Whether that may have had something todo with my later interest in first-century pastoral Palestineand the contrasting blare of brass in Rome I do not know.Perhaps not. I tried to reread Ben Hur when I was plotting The Robe and found it slow going. (However, I have had thesame experience with other famous books which I have comeback to after a lapse of many years.) When I was aboutsixteen I read Inno