The Mother of all my Other Pivotal Moments

 I got a call from a woman who likes to talk which is fine, I’m a good listener. Or at least I used to be. I kept wishing we were doing a Zoom call so she could see me giving her the classic hand signal to wrap it up. I haven’t had the urge to do that since my husband had his stroke in 2000. He was long-winded but she takes too many 35-40 second pauses in between her words stretching her short, boring stories into epic novels. Her story about a trip the store, for example, was as long as the recorded version of Melville’s whopping fish tale and it could have been written on a grocery list. I think at one point she was reading me her grocery list. I don’t know for sure because I was giving myself a manicure and got distracted by how strong my nails have gotten lately. She’s always had that same speech pattern but on that particular day it was driving me to Crazyville. I had the same problem with her monologue holding my interest as I did when I first tried to read Moby Dick and Melville had the sub-text of good vs. evil within his 752 pages. Her sub-text was the price of eggs and milk went up.

“Call me Ishmael,” Herman Melville wrote on page one of his epic novel. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”  Okay, why would anyone call him anything but ‘Ishmael’ if that was his real name? Why didn't he just say, "My name is Ishmael" inquiring minds want to know? And yet American Book Review rates “Call me Ishmael” as number one on the '100 Best First Lines in Novels’. 

My favorite opening line is rated at number nine:  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...."  Charles Dickens wrote that sentence in 1859 for his A Tale of Two Cities. If he had been in my high school English class back in the 1950s the teacher would have been up his butt about his “lack of proper punctuation” and would have made him change some of those commas to periods. Run-on sentences were my specialty back then. I still write a lot of them, but my reading habits and tastes have changed since the days when I struggled (and usually failed) to read the classics from start to finish. Now, an opening line that holds my interest goes something like: “He was so hot my panties melted." Just kidding! I'm not that shallow although one peek at my Kindle library might argue otherwise.

Did you learn how to diagram a sentence when you were taking English grammar in high school? I nearly flunked all my English classes back then but when I had to take a zero credit class that we students affectionately called “Dumbbell English” in my first semester at college it all clicked in place and I got an A out of that class. I learned how to diagram the stuffings out of sentences and it was fun. I don’t know if it was the enthusiastic instructor that made the difference or if my dyslexia was on the verge of sorting itself out or a combination of both, but I loved that class. My ‘composition workbooks' from the class survived the drastic purges this past year. The covers are torn and heavily taped, one has a barely readable spine, but I still love them.

In everyone’s life there are pivotal moments that change the trajectory of our lives and looking back I can see clearly that that class was a pivotal highlight in my life. I could write as many crazy-long sentences as I liked and not get disapproving red marks on my pages as long as I kept my subjects and verbs and dependent clauses where they belonged. Diagramming became like auto-correct to me, showing me the errors of my ways.

Some might ask how I got into college if my grades in anything that required reading and writing were so bad. Simple. I got straight A’s in the art classes and in classes like mechanical drawing. I was the very first girl to take mechanical drawing classes in our high school district and it had an instructor who (along with my mom) fought for me to be allowed in the previously all boys classes because, he said, I had a raw talent. What he didn’t know is it wasn’t so raw. My dad had taught me how to draw blueprints and schematics since I was old enough to hold a pencil and I wanted to know what he was drawing. I had four semesters of mechanical drawing and the instructor even had my drafting table taken down to the wood shop to get it sanded smooth because it was always giving me runs in my nylons and it's just now dawning on me to wonder how he knew that. I suppose my legs were more interesting to look at than the boys he'd been teaching since Columbus departing Spain in 1492.

In my first three years of college I continued getting mostly A’s in art but before my third semester when I went to my adviser to get approval for classes that would lead me to a career in architecture he flatly refused to okay them. “You girls are only here to get a Mrs. Degree,” he told me, “and I can’t allow you to take up a seat in a class a guy will need to earn a living.” I was young and dumb back in those days and didn’t fight for myself like I would have in the post Feminine Mystique era that came shortly after those days. I let him put me on a path toward a teaching art degree. But I never made past that third year.

…Until twenty-five years later when I finally went back to college and got a degree in fine arts. Walking across that stage to collect my diploma was the mother of all the other pivotal moments in my life. It didn’t lead to a career change. That ship had sailed with the invention of computers taking over the lower level drafting jobs and the projection for jobs in the field of architecture showing a decline for the foreseeable future, but finishing collage gave me a special kind of pride in myself, that after all those years I wasn't a failure anymore. I was a college graduate! To this day it ranks in the top three of my proudest accomplishments. 

My other two proudest accomplishments? The way I handled the twelve and a half years after my husband's stroke counts for one. The other is me finally getting to have a house built starting with a plan in my head to watching it get built. Oh, yes, it's going to be hard to leave here but houses should work for your life-style and my life-style needs to change.

The next paragraph was written just to prove I could condense my greatest accomplishment down to one 88 word, run-on sentence. (Okay, I admit it doesn't take much to amuse me these days.)

Call Me Jean. Some years ago—never mind precisely how many—having no upcoming wedding plans on the horizon like all the other girls in my high school I put myself through three years of college, then dropped out and spent the next twenty-five years feeling like a failure until I returned and two years later walked proudly across a stage to collect my diploma, with no thoughts whatever of sailing about the watery parts of the world that I finally did finish reading about in Melville's epic novel. ©