Topical Guide 28
Mark Dorset
Persistence; Folly; Fecklessness
Just about everything in this chapter develops these themes. Let’s look at two examples: Peter’s game with the surface of the water and Big Grandfather’s procedures for starting “him.”
While Grandfather patiently cranked and adjusted something and cranked again, I sat in the stern, dangling my legs overboard, playing a game with the undulating surface of the water. I tried to bring the soles of my bare feet as close to the surface as I could without touching it. It was a game that could not be won, a game that my father would have considered like my chasing kittens on the day that my mother tumbled from her lawn chair. I couldn’t win the game because I couldn’t know that I had reached the point I was after until I had passed it. To make matters worse, I included a forfeit in the game on this day: if I touched the surface ten times before Grandfather got him started, I would brave the clams. I would put some into the front of my bathing suit, just as Grandfather did, and take my chances on their biting.
I had already failed nine times, . . .
He was, as he acknowledges, playing a game that he couldn’t win. To quote from “Take a Pew” in Beyond the Fringe: “Some of us think life’s a bit like that.” I ask myself: Is Peter’s game a life lesson? If so, is it going to lead to a bitter assessment of life, the conclusion that everything is futile? Or will it become an endorsement of Emerson’s notion that an unattainable goal has the virtue of giving one an inexhaustible reason for living, for striving:
“Aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. . . . then it will be a good always approached,—never touched; always giving health.”
Search me. I’ve tried playing Peter’s water game. It’s frustrating, let me tell you. I think that it is like life, but maybe that’s just me.
Grandfather had a series of procedures that he would follow, each of which was more severe than the last. . . .
Let him rest for a while.
Curse at him.
Remove his air cleaner (that’s the piece of window screen that keeps any really large pebbles from falling into his carburetor) and try choking him with your hand.
Squirt some gas right into his carburetor. (It’s a good idea to keep an oil can with gas in it handy.)
Pull his spark-plug wire off and clean it with your shirt.
Repeat procedures 1 through 5 until you’re convinced that stronger measures are required.
Change his spark plug.
Smack him with the crank handle.
I know some facts that I feel certain lurk behind this passage.
First, Kraft’s paternal grandfather had a trim sloop that he had built (single-handedly, I think). The boat was called Rowdy. It had a small inboard engine that Kraft’s grandfather had salvaged from some other use. The engine was started by hand-cranking, but Kraft’s grandfather never failed to start it and never resorted to cursing at it or smacking it with the crank handle. So, Rowdy’s engine did not become Rambunctious’s.
Second, Eric and Madeline’s first car was a 1960 Morris Mini Minor that they bought, used, from an English architect who had brought it with him when he came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Krafts lived at the time. Like the Mini in this picture, it had right-hand drive:
The Mini had an electric fuel pump that was mounted beneath the car, under the rear seat, exposed to the elements. “What!?” I think I hear you exclaiming. “Who on earth would locate a fairly fragile and absolutely essential piece of equipment like that in such a vulnerable location?” Well, it would have been some employee of Joseph Lucas, the founder of Lucas Electrics or Lucas Industries, which supplied the electrical equipment for the Mini and many, many other British automobiles in the mid-to-late twentieth century—or possibly Lucas himself. (Lucas electrical devices, including headlights, were so notorious for malfunctioning or failing to function that British motorists referred to Joseph Lucas as “the Prince of Darkness.”)
The fuel pump in the Krafts’ Mini often just stopped pumping. The car would sputter to a stop in the middle of traffic, on the way up a hill, while rounding a treacherous curve, or at some other interesting point in life’s journey. The Krafts learned a trick that other Mini owners also quickly learned: the pump could be revived by a sharp smack with a small rubber-headed mallet. To give it that smack, Eric or Madeline would have to get out of the car—in the middle of traffic, halfway up a hill, while at a standstill on a treacherous curve, or at some other interesting point in life’s journey—and crawl under the car far enough to give the pump that wake-up smack.
So, although Rowdy’s engine did not become Rambunctious’s, I feel quite certain that the rubber-headed-mallet smack became the crank-handle smack.
Here’s Billy Murray, in 1914, singing “He’d Have To Get Out And Get Under (To Fix Up His Automobile)”:
[more to come on Monday, June 21, 2021]
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