Four Found Postcard Captions
THE WADSWORTH-LONGFELLOW HOUSE
Portland, Maine
1.
This most historic house in the State was built in 1785 by Major General Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who spent much of his life here.
2.
The Boy's Room was occupied by all the Longfellow boys at various times. Here the Poet wrote his first poem. Here also is the old trundle bed and the scarred school desk.
3.
The Rainy Day Room. Its chief interest is in the old desk on which the Poet wrote, in 1841, “The Rainy Day.“ “It rains, and the wind is never weary.“
4.
The Guest Room of the house contains the four-poster bed and rocking chairs of the General's wife, Elizabeth. To this room the Poet brought his bride, and here, later, the Poet's father died.
Quadratic
A
That year, Mr. Clark taught four sections of high school algebra. The classes met the first four periods of the day, finishing up before we juniors, who took the course, went to lunch in the basement cafeteria. Pretty early in the semester we noticed Mr. Clark, who is dead now, had developed a persistent and pervasive habit of speech.
Some of us were also taking speech and debate. The teacher there, Mr. Schultz, would have us do what he called a clapping speech. The clapping speech was meant to illuminate the little things we all say and do without thinking. Like saying “um“ or “you know“ or looking up at the ceiling when you are trying to think of the next word or licking your lips during the pauses between words in your prepared text. Mr. Schultz listened to us give a speech — mine was on “Harvesting the Riches of the Sea“—and while you were talking, he picked out a particular tic you were repeating — mine was fiddling with a shirt button, I think. And then he clapped his hands together, startlingly loud. You'd jump, but you would have to go on giving your speech, all the time trying to figure out what it was you were doing.
Mr. Clark said “for it“ at the end of his sentences. He did it so many times that you would be clapping all the time if he was giving a clapping speech. He didn't seem to notice. The “for it“ was kind of a vestigial phrase. “This is what you would do for it.“ It got worse as the semester wore on, to the point where he would chalk out an equation on the board, turn back to the class, and say simply “for it,“ pointing at the conclusion, the punctuation of some sentence he was speaking to himself. And then he began saying “for it, for it,“ sending my classmates, who had begun counting the number of for its, into fits of laughter. “Hey, what's so funny, for it?“ he asked. It was something. He retired the next year.
B
All the classes were driven to distraction by this. Everyone was keeping track. We would compare figures at lunch. Mark Maxwell organized the effort and designated an official counter for each class. At lunch each day, he posted the final tally on the cafeteria bulletin board — the aggregate numbers, the total daily accumulation. He kept running charts, the bars of the graphs in different colors, of the trends and averages, the correlation with the days of the week and the weather. There was a special category for the double for it and a place for a triple for it that never did come.
Mr. Clark commented often on our attentiveness. We hung on to his every word. We waited through his long string of explanations and proofs about squares and their roots to get to the periodic moment where he would conclude with a for it. We watched the scorekeeper in our class make another hash mark in his notebook. We looked for patterns at lunch. Did the frequency diminish over time? Increase? Some tried to cook the books, asking questions about the material designed to have Mr. Clark reflect meditatively. This made it all the more likely he would utter the formula.
X
Mr. Clark gave an assignment to create our own quadratic equations. We all used i and t as variables. At the board, Mr. Clark reduced and canceled our redundant integers, our camouflage of multiples. He drew the final = and solved for x. The answer was always the same: x=4it. He tapped the chalk on the board a couple of times, dotting the i, and turned to us triumphantly, “The solution is four eye tee, for it.“ We applauded.
C
We didn't learn a thing, of course, about quadratics. It's true what they say about high school math. I never needed it in life after high school. I am writing this, years later, on graph paper I found lying around. I use it to keep the lines of my handwriting more or less level. I thought I would jot down this memory before it got away from me. I like filling in the spaces of the grid, one letter to a square, a word or two or three in each ten-by-ten box of squares. I am doing this early in the morning before my kids wake up. They find pretty much everything I do now hard to understand.
Four Men in Uniform
MEAT
Because I could play baseball, I never went to Korea.
I was standing on the dock in San Francisco with my entire company. We stood at parade rest, wearing helmets, loaded down with winter and summer gear. We were ready to embark. My name was called. I remember saying excuse me to the men in rank as I tried to get by with my equipment. Then I sat on my duffel and watched them file aboard, bumping up the side of the ship, the cables flexing. There was rust in the bilge. I could hear the water below me. Sailors laughed way over my head. It only took a few hours. There were some people there to wave good-bye, though not for the soldiers since our shipping out was something secret.
Nothing was ever said. I was transferred to another unit where all the troops were baseball players. I played second base on the Third Army team. I batted seventh and bunted a lot. We traveled by train from one base to another in Texas, Georgia, and on up into New Jersey for the summer. We had a few cars to ourselves including a parlor with an open platform. The rest of the train was made up of reefers full of frozen meat. The train was aluminum and streamlined. We could stand in the vestibules, or in the open doorway of the baggage car where we kept the bags of bats and balls and the pinstriped uniforms hung on rods, and look out over the pink flat deserts. There wouldn't be a cinder from the engine, the train's wheels a blur. You would see up ahead on the slow curves the white smoke of the whistle trailing back over the silver boxcars of meat, and then you would hear the whistle. Some cars still needed to be iced, so we'd stop in sad little towns, play catch and pepper while the blocks melted in the sun and the sawdust turned dark and clotty on the platform. We'd hit long fly balls to the local kids who hung around. We left them broken bats to nail and tape.
The meat was our duty. It was what we said we did even though everyone knew we played baseball. The Army wanted us to use frozen meat instead of fresh. We ran the tests in messes to see if the men could tell the difference. We stood by the garbage cans and took the plates to scrape and separate the scraps of meat to weigh for waste. A red plate meant the meat was fresh. The bone, the chewed gristle, the fat. I picked it out of the cold peas and potatoes. Sometimes whole pieces would come back, gray and hard. The gravy had to be wiped off before the meat went on the scale. Those halls were huge, with thousands of men hunched over the long tables eating. We stood by watching, waiting to do our job.
It made no difference, fresh or frozen, to the men. This pleased the Army. Things were changing. Surplus from the war was being given to the UN for the action in Korea. There were new kinds of boots and rifles. Back then every camp still had walk-in lockers. The sides of meat hung on racks. The cold blew through you. Blue inspection stamps bled into the yellow fat of the carcasses. All gone now. That's what I did in the service.