The Saturday Morning Blogger – Moby Dick – and other classics

James Barrington

One of my dad’s younger brothers taught honors English in the El Paso school district for many years. From everything I remember of him, he was one of those teachers who students loved to hate. They loved him because he challenged them and made them think. They hated him because he challenged them and made them think. Such is the life of most high school students.

My uncle Oliver’s favorite book was Moby Dick. On a number of occasions when our families were together he and my dad would get into conversations that were being led by Oliver. On more than one of those occasions the topic turned to Moby Dick.

My older brother worked through an assignment to read Moby Dick during his upper class years in high school, but by some miracle I was never given that assignment. As time passed, I came to realize that the Moby Dick comic book I had read as a child was probably severely lacking in the content available in Melville’s original book. About the time we moved from Florida to New Hampshire, I was in a bookstore in Jacksonville and discovered an unabridged copy of Moby Dick among the “bargain classics” for one U.S. dollar. Figuring I couldn’t go wrong for such a paltry sum, I invested a dollar and spent the next six months reading Moby Dick and writing my critical analysis that I knew Oliver would expect.

It turned out to be a really great “bonding experience.” I would write to him my observations and he would write back all of the thing I had missed. When his wife had died, about ten years earlier, I was the only member of his side of the family that made the trip to El Paso for the funeral. I stayed an extra day after the funeral; that was when the “bonding” really began. We talked about life, death, literature, and a lot of his memories about my dad’s childhood that I had never heard before. He told me about running away from home at 16 to join the army, only to find himself “held over” as a buck sergeant in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. When he returned home after touring Europe in pursuit of the German army, his high school principal help “recreate” his high school transcript from the ashes of the burned school house. With his A/B average he went to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State) on the GI Bill and finished his master’s degree.

Born a couple of months before my mother, he died a couple of months after she did. He gave me his most prized collection of books, saying that they would be “pearls before swine” for his only child. The collection included such diverse titles as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Oliver’s life was a “classic” in its own right. Like all great classics, I think of him often and fondly.

The Saturday Morning Blogger – Vacations

James Barrington

Google defines “vacation” as “an extended period of recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling.”

When I was part of the work-a-day world, a vacation to me definitely involved leaving home and phone behind. More importantly than that, it involved a change of pace. I didn’t want to be ruled by a timepiece. It involved a change of scenery – preferably one with a completely different type of scenery than what I could see within fifty miles of home.

I grew up watching Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt. Charles Kuralt spent his professional life “On the road” seeing America. That lifestyle appealed to me – and still does to this day. For me, a perfect vacation involves having some place in mind that I would like to visit, but plenty of time to go there and get back without stressing over a schedule. Too many lives are ruled by schedules. My professional life was ruled by clocks and calendars, with appointments, meetings, deadlines and other generally annoying obstacles to “smelling the roses.” In my perfect vacation (which I have never had), I pull away from the house heading in the general direction of my ultimate destination, and drive. If I see something along the way that catches my eye or piques my imagination, I stop and take a closer look – probably photographing as I go. When it’s time to sleep, I’ll stop and sleep. When it’s time to eat, I’ll find food. Maybe I’ll eat in a restaurant or maybe I’ll cook a meal over a campfire. That concept drives my wife crazy. So, in order not to have to listen to “where are we spending tonight” every fifteen minutes, I’ve given in to her programmed, packaged idea of a vacation just to get her to make a trip out of the house.

In recent years, I’ve heard her grudgingly agree in such a way that I know it won’t be worth the effort to actually leave the house. I love my wife, but many of her interests and mine exist in different universes. Very seldom do we find common grounds on television shows or movies, and the Bible is about the only book we both read.

So, on those rare occasions when we leave Randall County together, we don’t drive and see the sights (my choice), we fly (her choice) and tolerate being treated like our baggage (which was lost both going and coming and left out in the rain to collect water on the return flight) on our last trip. Maybe I should write a book about that.

On the other hand, I’ll just write a blog…