'Progress not perfection'

When 80-year-old Eugene was transferred to a nursing home earlier this year he left behind a lot of his books and so forth that pertained to philosophy, self-help and career advice. One cassette tape series from 1999 was entitled, “If You Can Talk, You Can Write.” This was the one thing I decided to take.

Driving through the Ohio countryside this past weekend, I decided to pop one into my Sony Walkman to keep me company. Boy, was I in for a surprise! I wasn’t expecting anything from the “seminar” leader Joel Saltzman (a known NYC author and lecturer, I gathered) and it turned out to be a lifesaver!

The biggest thing I got from the 4-hour long crash course on writing is that it’s a “game”! It’s not meant to be treated as something “serious” like other professions! You’re supposed to have fun with it and “play” around with it.

One of the big take-home mantras was, “Progress not perfection.” This is almost a foreign concept to someone like me who remembers my journalism training at Ohio State that was always oriented around “beating” the competition and having the perfect lead and well-rounded story that never was unbalanced and was fact-filled as well as investigative, etc., etc., etc.

I’ve long felt my professors at OSU, some of whom were Pulitzer Prize winners, gave me the greatest gift through their tutelage, especially knowing they were old and on the edge of retirement and I was just lucky enough to catch the tail-end of their accumulated brilliance, but more and more I see they left out much of the free-spirited, free-wheeling side of writing.

My whole goal in life lately, especially since the very untimely deaths of one of my very best friends and my only sister, has just been to try and feel free. I don’t want to be hindered anymore by my sensitive brain that never feels I’m good enough and that I just can’t compete. I realize some of this baggage is due to my father, and then my professors, putting so much pressure on me to be the best.

*****

Here is an outtake of a conversation I taped between me and my mother (without her permission) when I was home over the Memorial Day holiday:

Mom: It started with him investing in soybeans. He just had no sense. He thought he could swing and sway with the stock market. Yeah, he swung all of his money away. Then he started drinking. Then he didn’t come home. Then he got picked up for drunken driving.

Lisa: How old were we when all of this was going on? Was I even born yet?

Mom: No. He was still drinking, I think, when you were born. No, he quit drinking and he was taking pills by then. But when Rita was born . . . My mother said, ‘Well, that’s why Rita was upset,’ and you were upset because all of this tension from all this stuff related to him getting a DUI.

Lisa: You mean when she was a baby?

Mom: Yeah, she used to have colic.

Lisa: Oh, yeah, that’s why daddy would get mad at her, right?

Mom: No, he didn’t care. He wasn’t around! He stayed the heck away!

Lisa: So he was what you would call an ‘absentee father’?

Mom: Yeah, most of the time. In fact, even when you guys were young he wouldn’t come home. He’d run the roads. Then he’d come home in the morning, go to bed. When I went to the office (as his receptionist) he wouldn’t come in. People were there. I remember calling the babysitter and saying, ‘Oh, wake him up,’ and she’d say, ‘No, I don’t want to, he’ll get mad.’ I said, ‘Well, he has to come into the office.’ I remember some guy came up the steps and he had a heart attack. Oh, God, that was horrible.

Lisa: Was that the truck driver?

Mom: Yeah. I don’t know why the heck, you know, he couldn’t just be a normal person.

Lisa: So with that truck driver . . . ?

Mom: They took him to the hospital but he died.

Lisa: No, but he was waiting for daddy’s office to open?

Mom: Yeah! When he wouldn’t come I called the paramedics and they came and got him and took him to the hospital but he died. I felt so bad for his kids because his wife was already dead.

Lisa: Well . . .

Mom: The guy had had a problem on the road and some hospital had treated him and said it was something else and let him go so it wasn’t just your dad. Just a big mess all the way around.

Lisa: Well how did you feel daddy was culpable?

Mom: Well, he didn’t come in! The guy sat there in the heat and everything. I kept telling him to come in. He knew it was office hours.

Lisa: Did he know there was somebody who was really ill and on death’s door?!

Mom: Well, no. But, you know, if you say you’re going to be in the office at 9 o’clock you ought to be there for God’s sake! Or just hang it up. Just like in Loudonville he used to run home between patients. He’d practically run them over . . . They’d be coming in the door and he’d practically knock them down getting out and getting in that car and running home for five minutes. That was the dumbest thing in the world.

Lisa: I wonder if that’s why he picked Loudonville?

Mom: No, he was a good doctor in the beginning and then he got onto these diet pills and that’s all he was at
the end. He didn’t treat anybody for anything.”