216: Robby brought me ...
Little Follies, “The Young Tars,” Chapter 6 continues
Robby brought me a brown paper bag filled with more scraps of paper on which Mr. Summers had written notes for things that he wanted added to the manual. I looked into the bag and pulled out and read one or two of the pieces of paper.
“Mr. Summers,” I said, “some of these are notes about things that are already in the manual. Here. Here’s one about the Tars Traits. I already typed the traits.”
“Good for you,” said Mr. Summers. “They’re in here, then?” he asked. He began flipping through the manual.
“Aye, sir,” I said. “The four Tars Traits, page three.”
“Good, good,” he said, turning to page three and scanning the list of traits.
“Where will I put this one?”
“What does that one say?”
“‘A Tar does what he’s told,’” I read.
“Just add it at the end,” said Mr. Summers.
“But it seems kind of important,” I said. “I mean, it seems more important than ‘A Tar never wears a dirty uniform,’ and that’s the First Trait now. Maybe we should make that the Fifth Trait.”
“You might be right. But it’s all typed, and it doesn’t really matter. Just add it at the end. Take the easy way out.”
I didn’t say anything, because I knew I couldn’t obey Mr. Summers. My mother and I had discarded many sheets of paper in the process of trying to make the manual neat. I liked the look of it, and I would have been a happy Tar if it had been cast in bronze just as it was, but if it was going to change, then it couldn’t change for the worse. I was going to have to retype the whole thing. I told myself that I wouldn’t really be disobeying Mr. Summers. After all, ‘A Tar does what he’s told’ wouldn’t be one of the traits until I had typed it.
“Say, there—chin up, Commodore Leroy,” said Mr. Summers. “Remember what I told you. It’s the journey that counts, not the destination, remember? Enjoy the journey. We’ve got quite a voyage ahead of us. You have to expect some changes along the way. You have to learn to take what fate dishes out without letting it throw you, if you know what I mean. As we Tars travel over the sea of life, we’re going to run into some storms now and then, and we can’t let them make us seasick, can we? We can’t let ourselves be tossed overboard by the tossing waves. A Tar has to keep his feet in a storm, Peter.”
He planted his feet and mimed keeping his balance on a rolling deck. Again there appeared on his face that look of being surprised by one of his own ideas.
“A Tar rolls with the swells,” he said.
“Aye, sir,” I said. I pulled out my notebook and jotted it down, with a note to make it Trait One and renumber the other ones.
The meeting that followed was the first ever conducted according to the manual, and it was a mess. Mr. Summers’s thinking about the conduct of the meetings was, as he had said of all his ideas for the Tars, only a beginning, and I was beginning to see that that meant “vague” and “foggy.”
“Commodore of the First Water Haskins,” commanded Mr. Summers, “call the Tars to order.”
“Okay,” said Robby. I could see that he was going to have to be trained for some time before he met the Tars Standards.
“Aye, sir,” I corrected him.
“Oh, yeah,” said Robby. “Aye, sir.”
“That’s good, Haskins,” said Mr. Summers. “You pay attention to Commodore Leroy. He knows the manual. He knows how to do things the Tars Way.”
Mr. Summers gave me a nod, and I began to feel stirring within me something that I couldn’t identify as either an emotion or an idea, something warm and thrilling, something that made me feel that I was standing steadier, that I could roll with the swells. It was power.
[to be continued on Wednesday, March 16, 2022]
In Topical Guide 216, Mark Dorset considers Traits, of Character, of Personality from this episode.
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