PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Thurday, December 23rd, was the last day of the workweek for me.  Friday the 24th was the legal holiday, and Cerulean was already off for Christmas break from the high school, and we had the prospect of spending part of the day together (that night, my church would hold two Christmas Eve services---the first mostly Christmas carols; the second, a very High Church liturgy---and at both I was to be the assistant celebrant, a very high and undeserved honor indeed).

Because the air was unusually and unseasonably chilly---even frigid---after an autumn that had been unseasonably warm, up until the first week of December, we on the survey crew remained in the car, at a public park, where we proceeded to "reduce figures":  which was a conversion of various elevation measurements we had taken (for which I had been the rodman) to the actual "above sea level" measurement of the county benchmark near the site, the elevation of which was known.  This called for careful, even painstaking, arithmetic; as the draftsmen would convert these to blueprint elevations from which the improvement to M-------le Road would be made.

At lunchtime, because of the impending Holiday (and because no further workd was planned for the afternoon), we made our way in the south part of the County to a retail complex of rather swank and high end business, including several restaurants.  Although clad as road workmen, we were just as welcome for lunch at one of these establishments as anyone else.  The menu was quite extensive, and expensive, and I was very glad I had brought with me far more than my usual three lunch dollars.

At this establishment was also an internal network of old-fashioned looking phones (the kind with the earpiece on a cord, and the microphone/speaker on an upright pedestal on which the earpiece would be placed when the call was over), each one numbered.  These could be used to call any other of the tables which were numbered.  The table number of an incoming call was not disclosed, unless the caller audibly stated it.  The gentlemen with whom I was eating placed the telephone in front of me, and shortly thereafter a call came in---from three ladies approximately my age (they were near our table, and seemed to become quite enthusiastic each time they made, or received, a call).  I picked up the phone, and the caller asked my name; when I gave my mundane first name, the caller hung up.  I found this to be rather rude, and it provided my fellow workers with a bit of amusement.  They were convinced that no girl, or woman, would care to speak with me.  So I asked them if they would allow me to make a call, without providing additional sound effects.  They agreed.  Our eyesight, as surveyors, may have been a bit sharper than others', and they spotted another table, and its number, for me to call.  As the call began, the person who answer asked my name:  this time, I answered, Starwatcher; and the other party, presumably for the sound of her voice a young lady of my age, began to ask me questions.  We were both students at small liberal arts college, at which we lived in dormitories.  I forget her major; mine was, as yet, undecided.  We continued our conversation until her party was about to depart to the cashier, and then the exit, and I thanked her for speaking with me.  She indicated that she, too, had enjoyed the conversation.  I did not disclose my mundane name during that conversation.  My coworkers were quite disappointed that, after having talked for so long (almost until our lunch was served; and, as she and I had talked, I had consumed a glass and a half of iced, orange pekoe tea with a slice---not a wedge!---of lemon), I had neither asked her out, nor asked for her residential telephone number.  

I wonder, to this day, if she would have continued the conversation to that length had I disclosed my mundane name.  I admit that, as Starwatcher, I felt more confident, more sophisticated, and very much a Poet (although what I wrote at that age, and until the summer of 1994, was---to use a phrase written by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, chapter two---sad trash).  Talking on that phone, without seeing the person to whom I was speaking, was very much like the c.b. experience.  The French historian, Joseph Barry, wrote a phrase (in his excellent biography of Georrge Sand, published in 1977), "One's name becomes one; one also becomes one's name" (I cannot cite page or chapter number), regarding Amandine Dudevant's assumption of the pen-name, George Sand.  I had not read this yet (and since reading it, I have never forgotten it), but I understood, then, the confidence that Amandine derived from George Sand, or George Russell from A.E., or Henri Beyle from Stendhal.  

Also of amusement to me:  my coworkers had neither made nor received a call.  Although married, they often boasted of their prowess in attracting women.  Although I had heard this, repetitiously, through the summer of 1975 and 1976, and through my Christmas break right until that day, I knew, on that day, that they did not have sufficient confidence.  Only Starwatcher had made a call; only Starwatcher had engaged in an extended, chaste, and rather collegiate conversation.  I derive great satisfaction, and some disappointment, from the fact that neither for the rest of my Holiday break, nor the subsequent summer of 1977 when I again worked with them for the last time, did we ever return to that restaurant.

Starward