MATTERS CAME TO A HEAD on the Saturday afternoon that Raskol and Marvin had persuaded me to set aside for starting work on the lighthouse—that is, the watchtower. They knew I was fretting over the science paper, and they were convinced that building a watchtower would be beneficial.
“It’ll take your mind off it,” said Raskol.
“And when we’re thinking of something else, the answer to the question might just sneak into our minds while we’re not looking,” said Marvin.
“Hey! I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Raskol.
“Still,” said Marvin, “I wouldn’t discount it.”
“No,” said Raskol. Did he wink? “You never can tell.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a try.”
“Let’s start on Saturday,” said Raskol.
“Saturday it is,” I said.
While I was waiting for them to show up, I dragged lumber from the pile in the garage to the building site atop the hill. Guppa was working in the garden, and I passed him again and again, all the while racking my brain for the right thing to say to lead him into a collaboration with Mrs. Jones, and growing increasingly aware that I ought to say at least something to him.
Finally, I stopped on one of my passages and asked, “How’s it going, Guppa?” (I don’t want you to think that “How’s it going, Guppa?” was the best opening line I could come up with for my campaign to get him to collaborate with Mrs. Jones. The campaign hadn’t started yet. I was just stalling.)
“Huh?” he grunted, driving his mattock deep into the roots of the bamboo.
“You’ve really made some progress!” I said.
He had made excellent progress. Starting at the back of the garage, where my father had formerly kept his chickens, he had created a rectangular garden plot, advancing toward the back of the yard, the foot of the hill, and the vanguard of the encroaching grove of bamboo. Though the weather was still too cold for Guppa to begin planting the garden, he had already planted a garden in his mind, so there were some shoots of green in there to reward him for his work and keep him at it.
“Thanks,” he said. He rested the mattock on the ground, stood up, stretched his back, and pulled his handkerchief from his overalls pocket. “I guess I have at that.” He looked back toward the garage and smiled at the green shoots in his mind’s garden. “And how about you?” he asked. “How’s your science paper coming?”
“I—” I turned away. This wasn’t a question I particularly wanted to answer.
“You’ve been working on it, haven’t you?” Guppa asked.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ve been working on it.” Thanks to Matthew, I’d come to believe that I was always working on it, so I was able to say this with some conviction.
“So,” said Guppa, “are you making any progress?”
“It’s kind of hard to tell.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Sometimes, you work away at something all day long and when the day is done you just can’t tell whether you’re any closer to seeing it finished than you were the day before.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly the way it is. Sort of like mixing shandy.”
“What?” said Guppa.
“You know how, when you’re trying to find just the right proportions of beer and lemonade for shandy, you line up some glasses and put a little more beer and a little less lemonade in each one, and the change is so gradual that you hardly know you’re changing from one glass to the next?” I said.
“No,” said Guppa.
“Oh,” I said. He surprised me. I still had the idea that all adults knew the same things, that there was a body of knowledge they shared equally. If Porky knew about shandy, then Guppa, who was so much older, certainly should know about it too. I was embarrassed for him. “Well, it’s not important,” I said, “but it is kind of like that.”
“What’s kind of like what?”
“Working on a job and not seeing much progress is kind of like going from one glass to the next—in that shandy business.”
“Oh,” he said. “I see.” He didn’t, though.
[to be continued]
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🎧 611: Matters came . . .