212: Producing the notebook . . .
Little Follies, “The Young Tars,” Chapter 4
4
PRODUCING the notebook earned me my second job, a job within the structure of the Tars this time.
“Now there’s an example for the rest of you,” boomed Mr. Summers. “Commodore Leroy has already got his notebook! Good for you, Commodore Leroy!”
Mr. Summers paused a moment, and I could see that he was thinking.
“You know,” he said, “I think you deserve something special for being so well prepared. You’re going to have a special job. You’re going to take notes. You will be our Scribe.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll keep the log.”
“The log!” said Mr. Summers. “Excellent, Commodore Leroy. The log. That’s exactly what you’ll do: keep the log. I knew you were right for the job. You have a way with words. You’ve got good handwriting, too, and you can spell.”
THE WORK of the Scribe had, I soon learned, two aspects. The keeping of the log was straightforward and really quite simple. All it required was careful observation, the ability to write legibly, and the ability to find the right word, or at least the almost-right word, quickly enough to keep the taking of notes moving along at or near the pace of the meeting. The other part of the job was the compiling, editing, mimeographing, collating, and stapling of the Tars Manual, and this turned out to be far from simple.
When Mr. Summers first presented me with the manual, it was in a box.
“Here, Peter,” he said, handing the box to me. “These are some notes for the Tars Manual.”
“The Tars Manual?” I asked.
“Yes indeed!” said Mr. Summers. “We’re going to have a nice fat manual that tells each and every Tar what to do and how to do it—how to be the best Tar possible, what to do at the Tars meetings, how to raise money for Tars events, how to play Tars games, and so on. We’ll have the Tars Oath in there, and the official Tars Hymn, the history of the Tars, some chanteys for Tars to sing when they’re off watch and just sort of hanging around the quarterdeck or whatever, and much, much more. We are going to have, in one handy place, just about everything a Tar needs to know.”
“Wow,” I said.
“As Scribe,” said Mr. Summers, “one of your jobs will be to get the manual into shipshape condition so that we can have it typed up and mimeographed for each of the lads. Can you type?”
“Not the real way,” I said. “I can’t use all my fingers. But I know how to use a typewriter, and we have an old one at home.”
“Good, good,” said Mr. Summers. “Then you can type the manual too.”
I opened the box. It was filled with papers of many varieties. There were sheets of lined composition paper, typing paper, sheets from a legal-size yellow pad, envelopes, sheets from a telephone message pad, scraps of brown paper bags, file cards, pages torn from a small spiral-bound notebook like mine, matchbooks, paper napkins, and, as Mr. Summers had said, much, much more. On each scrap of paper, Mr. Summers had written something that he wanted included in the Tars Manual.
“Now some of these are just rough ideas,” said Mr. Summers.
He took one from the box and read it to himself. A smile came to his face, the kind of smile one sees on the face of young parents when they look at their infant child while it is sleeping. He shook his head slightly, as if he had to hand it to himself for having conceived so good an idea as whatever idea he had found on the scrap of paper in his hand. He returned it to the box and patted the stack of papers as he might have patted a son on the head.
“This is only the beginning, remember, Peter,” he said. “Think of your work as a journey—”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The fog that had figured so prominently in Mr. Summers’s vision of the Tars’ future was beginning to thicken again. “What should I, um, do with all of this?” I asked.
“Just type it up. That’s all you have to do,” he said. “There’s some pretty good stuff in here, some fine stuff, some really fine stuff, but it has to be typed, that’s all. Nothing to it.”
I looked at the box of papers, on which Mr. Summers’s hand still rested affectionately. What Mr. Summers wanted struck me as more than I was capable of doing, even as something that was in some way wrong for me to do. These were Mr. Summers’s ideas, and from the way he handled them it seemed likely that he wasn’t going to want me messing around with them. I would be a lot better off, I thought, not even to begin messing around with them.
“This job might be too hard for me,” I said.
“Look, Peter,” said Mr. Summers. He gripped my shoulders. “Look out there.” He swept his hand toward the windows again. ”The future is out there. Somewhere. The future of the Tars.” He squeezed my shoulders. I tried to smile. “Who knows where we’ll go from here. Who knows what the Tars might become.” He squeezed harder. “What do you think of that? Exciting, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Great.” I smiled, but his squeezing my shoulders was bringing tears to my eyes.
“And wherever the Tars may go, whatever they may do, whatever they may become, they’ll look to their manuals to guide them!”
“Ow!” I cried.
“Oh,” he said, relaxing his grip. “Sorry, Peter. I get a little carried away about the Tars sometimes, I suppose. Still, I just can’t help being enthusiastic about this. Just think of it, Peter,” he said, and in his enthusiasm he reached again for my shoulder. When he saw me flinch, he stopped himself and held his open palms out to show me that he wasn’t going to grab me again. “Hundreds—thousands of Tars, Peter, dressed in their uniforms, standing tall, learning the Tars Oath from a manual that you, Commodore Peter Leroy, typed.”
[to be continued on Thursday, March 10, 2022]
In Topical Guide 212, Mark Dorset considers Jargon; Technical Terms from this episode.
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