🎧 393: The primary pursuit ...

     The primary pursuit of most Punta Cachazudans was to discover and employ new methods of killing time. They passed the hours with games of cards and shuffleboard, shell gathering and fishing, gossiping and arguing, but the most popular way to keep busy was to learn something new. Punta Cachazudans loved to attend classes and workshops. A few were taught by instructors from local schools and colleges, but most were taught by other Punta Cachazudans. Some of the instructors were retired practitioners of the arts they taught. Others were lifelong amateurs. A few were just eager, well-meaning frauds. Because the classes reflected their instructors’ vocations and avocations, they ranged all over the vast savannah of human interest, from celestial navigation to astrology, from watercolor painting to plumbing. Language classes, of the type geared to teaching foreign clichés and phrases useful for a traveler, were especially popular, and Punta Cachazudans who had taken these classes loved to season their speech with the exotic phrases they had learned, with the result that many a conversation in Punta Cachazuda had a Babelic flavor:
     “Hey, guten Tag, Ray. Comment ça va?”
     “Oh, not too bad. Pas mal. Can’t complain. Es muy caliente, though, nein?”
     “Bozhe moy, you said it! Sehr warm, sehr warm.”
     “Buon giorno, Ray, George. Wie geht es Ihnen?”
     “Oh, pas mal, Harry. Pas mal, gracias a Dios.”
     “Can’t complain, Harry. How about you? Kak vy pozhyvaete?”
     “Well — ”
     “You keeping busy? Fuyez-vous les dangers de loisir?”
     “Pretty much. Thought I might do some fishing this afternoon. Want to come along?”
     “I don’t know. I’m kind of pooped.”
     “Oh-ho, out with the lustige Witwe again, Harry?”
     “Well, heh-heh.”
     “You know what they say — a buen bocado, buen grito.
     “Ha, ha, ha.”
     “Cela va sans dire, nein?”
     “Mais, oui. Das versteht sic von selbst all right.”
     Herb took Spanish and Predicting the Weather, and he joined the Green Thumbs and the Poker Hands. He taught the Hands to play Piper Poker, but none of them cared for it much, and they only agreed to play a few hands of it whenever the club met at Herb’s because they thought he was a nice guy. Lorna took Backyard Botany and Small-Boat Handling and joined the Shell Gatherers and the Never-a-Cross-Word Puzzlers and organized a group that assembled Comfort Kits for patients in nursing homes and hospitals and for children in foreign lands.
     After a while, Herb posted a notice on the recreation hall bulletin board for a class that he proposed to teach: “Repairing Things Around the Home.” He had only a few students, most of them women, perhaps because the men felt that they didn’t need to be taught how to repair things around their homes, or perhaps because the men didn’t care to repair things around their homes. Lorna offered a class on devising and solving logical puzzles. At the first class quite a few people showed up just to be polite to Lorna, and even more people showed up to find out what the heck this was all about. Attendance fell off considerably at the second class, many of the students pleading headaches that had set in after the first class. At the third class, Lorna was left with just one student, Andrea Cogliano, who had developed a genuine passion for brain-racking puzzlers. Herb tried offering a course in salesmanship, but no one showed up at all, since no one in Punta Cachazuda had anything to sell or any desire to sell anything. He was more successful with a class called Making Useful Gadgets. In the second year he deleted “Useful” from the title, and the course became one of the most popular among male Punta Cachazudans, who took to whistling while they worked and — later, of course — formed a number of whistling quartets on the barbershop model, organized concerts, staged whistle-offs, and so on.
     Lorna offered to teach soap-carving and at first attracted only a small number of students, since so many were still wary of Lorna-induced headaches. Attendance grew and grew, however, when the word got around about Lorna’s talent as a sculptor and teacher and because rumors began to circulate, whispered on the shuffleboard court or at the market, that if the students progressed acceptably Lorna might bring in live models.
     Life in Punta Cachazuda wasn’t bad. May visited them each year for a couple of weeks, and even she agreed that it was not bad.

     It really wasn’t bad, you know. I had been going to Florida in the winter for — oh I don’t know how long, but I had always gone to Miami Beach. It was just where everyone went then. It was where you had fun. In the sun. I never dreamed of going anywhere else, and I certainly didn’t like the sound of this Montezuma place when they first wrote to me about it. It sounded just deadly. Well, it was deadly in a way, of course. There wasn’t anything like a nightclub, or even a bar. There was a recreation hall. Really. But, on the other hand, there was all that gorgeous sand, and those transfixing sunsets. I couldn’t have lived there, of course, but still it wasn’t bad.

     Life was pleasant, their time was filled, and they were doing some of the best work of their lives, but sometimes, watching the sun set into the Gulf, they had the thought that something was missing. They had no audience.

In Topical Guide 393, Mark Dorset considers Language and Languages: Learning and Translating; and The Artist, the Work, and the Audience  from this episode.

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