242 Philadelphia

RUDIMENTS, pt. 242 --Philadelphia Story

I was pretty fast, fast at most everything I did. In one of my first jobs, NJ Appellate, the guy, Ron, told me to slow down. Flat out, just like that. He said 'Working fast is good, but good's not worth it if the accuracy's gone.' By which he'd meant to say, take a deep breath and watch what you're doing. I took his advice, and from then on rather enjoyed my own, set, pace. It was rather funny though, in light of the fact that this was the same guy who would hand me the keys to his new Ford and tell me to get down to the Courthouse docket room in Philadelphia's City Hall before it closed in forty-five minutes. (The material had to be time and date stamped for arrivals, and most things just made it or were 'paid for' to be back-dated. Yes, business is crooked everywhere). So, behind the wheel I'd get and at breakneck speed I'd terrorize my way all the way to 'Philly.' It was OK to be fast sometimes. By the way, in the same way that the locals in San Francisco never say 'Frisco' and detest those who do, in Philadelphia no one ever says 'Philly' - even if the cream cheese people say it in their advertising, and the Philly Cheese-Steak people do in theirs. It's usually enough to get you bopped upside the head. I began thinking about all this as I drove. It occurred to me that in my own home environment - being lower class, with Dad a laborer and a guy who just 'produced' endlessly, I'd never been brought up on 'quality.' In that sense, working at my first job like that the only idea I had was to please the boss, and that pleasing, to my thought, or my non-thought, simply meant giving as much out as 'finished' as possible, forgetting the accuracy or quality. It was 'quantity, not quality,' for sure. It was pretty simple, and stark, but it was the only way I'd been brought up. Now it seems so obvious as to look stupid. A peon, a slave, only wants to please, and if pleasing comes from giving more and more, at breakneck speed, so be it. The erroneous idea was that the more you did, the better notice you'd elicit. Not so. Accuracy and quality were more important; but I'd never been shown or taught that. It would have taken my father a bit of self-reflection to grasp that and turn it along to me. But, he was never that kind of guy anyway and I just don't think he did those sorts of things. My aunt almost always refused to drive in any car of which he was the driver, because, as she'd put it, 'Andy, you drive like a cowboy.'  I'd joke with her, later on, 'Hey, Aunt Mae, you should drive some day with my mother, over train tracks; that's fun too.' (Referring to the train wreck). Whenever my father would build anything -  although it got done and worked  and all that, whether a closet he'd build into a corner, or a  doorway he'd install, or molding  or whatever, it was always  over-sized, heavy-looking, too large, and just never quite  exact. Never a thing of beauty,  just of a ham-handed, large and heavy, function. To this day I dislike large, bulky objects.
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In some ways, I think that's why, early-on I took a turn  for the cerebral, with Art, writing, thought, poetry, reading and philosophy and all that stuff. Stuff which made him cringe - but he'd exposed to me the 'wrongness,' for myself, of the physical. I was no good  with 'objects,' had no feel or finesse for 'things' and wasn't concerned with the time it took to properly measure, scale, cut and plane. He also needed noise, and the social, and other people around. I hated all that. I would revel in solitude, sitting at the big, empty, night kitchen table, drawing or reading, or whatever. He'd come in from watching TV, where the others were, completely befuddled by my acts. Why I would do these things, why wasn't I in the other room, watching Bonanza, or Rawhide or Wagon Train, whatever it was. To me that was all large, stupid stuff, bounded by logic and law. To me, all this other stuff, the small points of my life, were without boundaries, and open.
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By the time I was 10 or 11, I already knew I wasn't much for  this world. I shared little of it, understood less, and had interest in even less than that. My terms of words and poetry, by 9 years old already, were the strange and obscure names I'd see on baseball cards. People (I thought they were 'old' then, now I see they were piddling kids) with names such as Clayton, Derek, Cletus, Elston, Marv, and  more. That was a whole, other, poetic world of possibility to me. Faraway farm boys, hokey, and from other places for sure. Add to that the multi-layered enticements of National Geographic Magazine, which back in those days was everywhere - lobby, waiting room, office, wherever. It's a little difficult to imagine now how that was, once, the only gateway out to the rest of the  world to someone who was not versed in other, far-off places, or the distant lands of global travel. For kids such as myself, that glimpse of things was mostly all we got. The way the world goes today, kids watching whatever they want, on phones while in trains, buses or cars, it twists my mind just to think of what world-view they must carry around. 'Every distance is not real,' as it has been put. If distance, like quantity, grows large and bulky, and attainable and everywhere with ease, what happens to the small, local stuff of 'quality?'