A man who loved quotations

 My great friend Melvyn would have been 95 today. He set out to be a concert pianist but had to find something else. He became a professor of medicine who followed politics, loved opera and literature, painted landscapes, built dollhouses for children and rooted for the Astros. He was also a collector of books of quotations. He went through them like popcorn.

In winter, he liked to get under the covers with a new book. He would first check the section on Shakespeare and then see what the quotable people had to say about love. He’d frequently wake up in the middle of the night, glasses still on his nose, but the book on the floor. He was always peeved that his place had been lost.

It surprised him when people quoted him — so he’d be surprised now:

 

I am predictably surprised when a former student comes to visit and quotes to me something that he/she remembers that I said, some memorable phrase to build a life on, the saying of which I do not remember at all. I know I should deny authorship, but I blush and stammer and say, “Oh gosh,” and slither out of an embarrassing but pleasing situation. It’s a little like telling a lie, and I know that’s wrong, but I also know it’s a mistake to mess with people’s memories.

You can quote me on that.

 

Everyone should have a friend like Melvyn. If you haven’t found him yet, get out of the house and start looking. It’s worth it.

• Source: Melvyn Schreiber, M.D., Sunday’s Essays; privately printed, p. 151.

Back home: Outdoors

 On Memorial Day, we ran across some ripe blackberries in the woods around Stone Mountain. Most are still red, but some are ready to eat. It was only the stern warnings of the Wise Woman that prevented me from wading out into the briars.

A lot of the spring wildflowers are gone. But I love to see two little ones that people tend to overlook: slender yellow woodsorrel, Oxalis dillenii, and Venus’s looking-glass, Triodanis biflora. The looking-glass blossoms are purple.

Back home: Politics

 We spent Election Day on the Cumberland Plateau, so there was some catching up to do when we got home. 

Two justices on the State Supreme Court were re-elected: Sarah Warren by 18 points and Charlie Bethel by 2.

Both are Republicans and both are bad judges — not because they are Republicans but because they looked for ways to empower people who wanted to overturn an election that the current occupant of the White House lost.

Judicial elections in Georgia are allegedly nonpartisan. They are on the same ballot as the primary elections.

To me, the failure to unseat such candidates was the big story. But I’m used to being in the minority.

In 2022, during the last midterms, more people voted Republican than Democratic. This year, 52.6 percent of the 2.07 million voters cast ballots in the Democratic Primary, 45.3 percent in the Republican and a little more than 2 percent requested nonpartisan ballots, meaning they voted only in the judicial elections.

Turnout was 28.2 percent.

People who tamper with elections or encourage others to do so shouldn’t be judges. And if we can’t inspire 30 percent of the registered voters to have a say about that, we’re in trouble.

I spent some time looking at newspapers and news sites operated by volunteers. I’m convinced that a lot of registered voters didn’t know that people in Georgia vote on judges or that judges who had such a shameful history were on the ballot.

People who want better government in Georgia have a lot of work to do.

A camper I admire

 Thinking about camping and campers, I thought of Roy Bedichek.

For years, he guided the University Scholastic League, an organization that encourages competitions for high-school students in Texas. Today, the league is known for trying to govern high school football. But it also encourages students to develop skills in music, drama and debate.

Bedichek had to travel the state, getting the competitions organized and resolving disputes. He camped on his travels, shunning hotels.

Rodney J. Kidd, Bedichek’s associate at the University Interscholastic League, traveled with him and left a lovely account. Bedichek had camping spots all over the state. The backseat of his car would come out and in would go camping gear: two small mattresses, a 5-gallon can of water, cooking gear and a nature library.

People do many things when they camp. I think Bedichek was after three things:

• He wanted to be close to nature. He wanted to wake up at 4 a.m. and look for the morning star, rather than for the light switch in a hotel room.

• He wanted to tend to his own needs. He liked to cook over an open fire.

• He liked the solitude — the quiet that a person needs to think and read. 

• Source: Rodney J. Kidd’s essay “Out-of-Doors Hotel” is in Three Men in Texas, edited by Ronnie Duggar; The University of Texas Press, 1967. His description of Bedichek’s camping techniques begins on p. 27.

Camping

 As the Wise Woman and I were leaving Cloudland Canyon, a fellow camper asked me about our rig. I confessed that I was only a pretender. We had rented a camper. We have been trying different kinds of vehicles because we don’t know what might suit us.

The fellow who asked had an enormous coach that reminded me of a touring bus. He was towing an enormous cargo trailer to carry all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into the enormous coach.

It made me wonder about what we’re doing when we go camping. I wondered about the point of getting away from it all while trying to drag it all with us.

“Camping” is a strange idea. Before I met the Wise Woman, I used to hike alone in the wildernesses of East Texas. I usually didn’t carry a tent. I traveled with a tarp that could be rigged as a shelter if it rained.

I was interested in seeing the country. Sleeping under the stars and cooking over fires made me feel closer to the place in a way that I didn’t understand — and still don’t. I went to the woods time and again. I guess you’d call that camping, although what I was up to had little to do with the wondrous technology available through the gazillion-dollar camping industry.

I wanted to see the places I loved, but I was also after something else. While a tent seemed an unnecessary burden, I always packed a book and a notebook. I seemed to need to hike and camp most when I had questions I wanted to think about.

On this recent trip I carried a copy of Gandhi’s The Way to God, a collection of his newspaper writings about his spiritual or interior life — or maybe the writings are about his own psychology. Gandhi’s ideas seemed vital to me as a younger man, and I wanted to see if that were still true.

We were expecting rain on our recent trip. I wanted to read and think while it rained. I once did that under a tarp, and now I’ve done it in a recreational vehicle.

The way I camp has changed and will continue to change as the Wise Woman and I get older. But I still camp. And if I had to account for my rig, I’d start with a book and a notebook. I would start with a state of mind.

Cloudland Canyon

 The Wise Woman and I spent three days at Cloudland Canyon, on the west side of Lookout Mountain in northwest Georgia. We camped on the West Rim and hiked down to Daniel Creek.

The canyon is 1,000 feet deep in places and was turned into a state park by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. It was once owned by the Sitton family and was called Sitton Gulch. But the clouds that hug the mountains routinely drop into the canyon. We saw the fog and can see why people call the place “Cloudland.”

The place was once the floor of an ancient sea. It got its shape 200 million years ago when old continents collided and pulled apart, creating the Cumberlands and Appalachians.

The rim, once the ocean’s floor, is a hard sandstone. Beneath it are layers of softer shale. The layers can be seen clearly as you hike down the canyon. Water that seeps into the ground erodes the softer rock, creating caves and sending boulders sliding toward the creek.

It’s wild, rugged, beautiful country. The older I get, the more I seem to need to see places like this.

Maybe it's a librito

 I have been thinking about novellas, probably because I have written a draft of something that might pass for one.

There are many ways to learn. One, not highly recommended, is by ignoring sound advice and just doing it. You write something that is like something you admire and try to figure it out as you go. When you finish the draft, you try to figure out what you’ve done.

I don’t like the word novella. The -ella ending, like the -ito in Texan, is a diminutive. I think — thinking in Texan — that it should be librito or bookito, not novelito. The specimens I like are little books, but I don’t think they are derived from the novel. (It seems equally plausible that they might be derived from a short story, but I don’t find that helpful either.)

To me, the craft in this project is like that of a photo essay. In the early days of photography, the artist simply framed a photo. Photographers who were trying to make documentary records — archeologists and sociologists, for example — took a lot of photos. You’d find as many photos in their archive as scenes in a novel.

By contrast, a photo essay might cover two facing pages in a newspaper. By moving in and out of the event or place, the photographer shows overall views of the subject and highly tightly cropped images. This form provides context and a sample of telling details.

One craftsman is trying to provide a complete picture, while the other is trying to be suggestive. They are after different goods.

I can spend an evening looking at a photo essay. I wouldn’t really want to spend an academic term on it.

I’m no scholar, so apply the appropriate warning label to this note. But having gotten some ink on my hands, I’m dubious that the novella is derived from the novel. That notion doesn’t help.