159: “Did you see this?”
Little Follies, “Take the Long Way Home,” Chapter 1 concludes
“Did you see this?” I shouted when I arrived at Raskol’s with the paper.
“Yeah,” said Raskol. “Margot and Martha burst in here with it in the middle of breakfast. My father was just slipping a soft-boiled egg into his mouth with his soup spoon when they flew into the house, wham, bam, no knocking, no hellos, all squeals and excitement. God, his face got so red and swollen I thought his head was going to blow up—barroom! Egg yolk was dripping from the corners of his mouth. He grabbed that broom handle he keeps beside his plate and smacked it on the table, right on the edge of Little Ernie’s oatmeal bowl. There was oatmeal all over the table, all over Ariane’s slip, and all over me, too. My first thought was, Maybe I should call the cops, but then my second thought was, Maybe I should call an ambulance. But it all worked out all right because my father is such a pushover for those two. As soon as he saw them, he said, ‘Hey, how’re my girls?’ and he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, tossed the broom handle into a corner, and squatted down so that the two of them could jump into his arms. He’s out on the dock with them now, thinking up names. They’ve got about sixty entries already written out.”
“Sixty?” I exclaimed. I had imagined that I would enter one name, one top-notch name, one name that was the product of weeks of satisfying effort, the one name that survived after I had rejected hundreds of others as second-rate or worse, one name of such transcendent aptness that it couldn’t lose. It didn’t strike me as appropriate to send in every name that popped into my head. When I saw the stack of papers that Margot and Martha and Mr. Lodkochnikov had beside them I said as much, taking care to direct my criticisms at the Glynns only, suggesting indirectly but as clearly as I could that Mr. Lodkochnikov probably disapproved as strongly as I did, but was just indulging their childish impropriety because he was a kindly sort.
“No, Peter,” said Margot. “You’re wrong. Martha and I talked this over for a long time, and Mr. Lodkochnikov agrees with us, too, don’t you, Uncle Bunny?”
“Uncle Bunny?” I repeated, soundlessly.
“Well,” said Raskol’s father, shrugging, “I got some reservations—”
“But you mostly agree with us, don’t you,” asserted Martha, “that what it comes down to is this—it’s not the name that pleases you or me that’s going to win; it’s the name that pleases the judges, whose decision is final.”
“There I agree with you,” said Mr. Lodkochnikov.
This was a shattering but indisputable truth. “You’re right,” I admitted.
“And the more names you send in,” said Martha, “the better chance you have of sending in one that they’ll all like.”
“You’re right about that too,” I said. I abandoned immediately the approach that I had intended to take and adopted theirs. Over the course of the next five or six weeks, we submitted, among the four of us (five, counting Mr. Lodkochnikov, whose names went in under Margot or Martha’s sponsorship), more than a thousand names for the school. Margot spent afternoons in the library hunting for ideas for names on old maps of Babbington (“Bolotomy Bay School,” “Musgrave Swamp School”); Martha was especially adept at deriving names from the names of animals and birds (“Herring Gull Elementary School,” “One-clawed Crab Elementary School”); Mr. Lodkochnikov contributed a few, but none of us thought they were likely winners (“Unfinished School,” “School of Hard Knocks”); and Raskol proved to have an uncanny knack for coming up with phrases that linked the school with aspects of everyday life in Babbington (“Slow Leak School,” “Foggy Day School”). Compared to theirs, my names were, well, lackluster. They had the virtue of accuracy, but one was much like another, and none, it seemed to me, offered anything that would make the judges sit up and take notice, nothing that would make them say, “That’s it! That’s the name we want!”
[to be continued on Friday, December 24, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 159, Mark Dorset considers Contests and Competitions: Techniques for Winning from this episode.
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