Pakistan Fisherman by Clevis O. Laverty

Written in 1957; Pakistan was still part of India in the early 1940s when these events took place.

Pakistan, land of snake charmers, belly dancers, and sacred cows, lay steaming under a blistering sun, screened by Oriental mystery. Fantastic funeral processions twisted and wound their way through the littered streets of Karachi, where untended sacred animals foraged, a menace to traffic.

Shopkeepers stood in doorways in open competition for the prospective customers strolling casually down the cracked and uneven sidewalk.

Two American Air Transport officers appeared, their voices animated, their eyes missing nothing and darting excitedly from shop to sidewalk to street. As if by signal, the shopkeepers came to life and rubbed their hands together in anticipation.

The officers stopped at a shop to peer into the interior, and the merchant wasted not a moment. He sprang in front of them, grasped an elbow and gestured toward his shop. He extolled the wares of his establishment with words the fell here and there and tumbled over one another.

The officers shook their heads and looked down the street. The shopkeeper seemed to grow frantic, his gestures wilder. He pleaded. He begged. He seemed to threaten. The two officers went into the shop.

When the shopkeeper entered the shop, his frenzy fell from him like a cloak, and he became the host, the businessman, the proprietor. He picked his way amough narrow tables and past full shelves of sandalwood figurines, ivory knickknacks, water-buffalo-horn carvings, and bolts of silk cloth distributed in reckless abandon. He beckoned his visitors to follow him, making sure that he led them past all those items that attracted the eye of the tourist.

After traversing the length of the room, the hose bade his guests sit down and relax. He clapped his hands, and a short plump woman appeared out of the darkness in the rear, bearing a tray with an ornate teapot and small teacups. Turkish cigarettes were passed around and the hose make polite conversation about the war, American politics, baseball, and Mahatma Gandhi as the two men sipped their tea and inhaled aromatic tobacco.

As one of the Americans finished his tea, he pointed to a piece of silk cloth and inquired for the price.

Ah. . .h. . . the fat was in the fire. The host became the businessman. He knew what interested his customers . . . no more shadow boxing. He girded himself as a gladiator for the fray. There would be haggling, but that was part of the game, a game at which he would bow to nobody.

The fish had taken the bait, and a master fisherman was handling the reel.

POSITION PAPER

by Cliff Laverty

This essay that my father did for a class he was taking in the 1960s on teaching children to write reminds me of the position of Joseph Gold's book: "The Story Species: Our Life-Literature Connection" -- Where Gold was writing about the critical importance of reading literature in order to understand ourselves, this looks at the same goal from the perspective of doing the writing. Here are my father's words:

My Position on the teaching of writing at the senior high school level remains fundamentally unchanged at the end of this institute: students must write in the light of their own experiences or valid vicarious experiences. The basic Procedures have been supported by enough speakers to give me, perhaps, more confidence that pre‑writing writing, sharing, rewriting, sharing, rewriting, and editing are valid points along the hard road to producing a finished manuscript.

My purpose is to help students communicate their feelings and reactions to an experience to someone else in such a way that it will touch a responsive note somewhere in the reader's experience. This can be done in a step‑by‑step procedure in which the student comprehends one step before going to another and then uses them as tools in shaping the finished product.

Prewriting stands as a natural first step, and in this very important preparation I have received several ideas that have not occurred to me before. The idea of brainstorming is so simple and powerful that the wonder is that it has eluded me until now. The many forms of brainstorming augment the idea notebook, which is a form of brainstorming but not as concentrated.

All narratives include a setting, people, action, points of view, and often include dialogue to give them reality. The student visits a place with which he is familiar and then learns to describe it. He learns that he does not need a complete description to touch base with his readers. If he mentions a farmhouse, the reader has seen farmhouses. If he alludes to that farmhouse as rundown or carefully tended, the reader has seen these in his own experience.

The writer then applies the same method to introducing a person. He reminds the reader of a person the reader has seen or knows, and an instant image appears that is meaningful to the reader. He describes a person in the light of that person's dominant characteristics.

At ease now with people and places, the budding writer now experiments with putting people into a place where there is action. This becomes a little more complicated because he now meets the five senses and must communicate sensory detail that the reader can identify. But with people and places out of the way, he can concentrate on this new experience.

Studying, discussing, and writing about points of view serve two purposes. For one thing he can make his narrative more interesting by seeing the incident through the eyes of a particular character or by changing to the point of view of another character. In the second place the teenage writer is no longer the center of the stage, and he sees the same incident through the eyes and feelings of several different people. He discovers that different people with different experiences in their backgrounds see events differently.

The student discovers dialogue. He can reveal personalities. He can save time by starting his narration in the middle of the action and bring his reader up‑to‑date as the characters communicate with one another. It becomes a valuable tool in giving realism to a story or an account.

Missed Takes or Mistakes

Watch your dog playing in the yard, catching a Frisbee, or doing a new trick. If your dog misses a turn, a catch, or the new trick, what does your dog do? Does she blame herself? Think of herself as not good enough? Or does she take it again.

Do you ever play solitaire? You know, that card game that is on every computer?

Well, I was just playing solitaire, and five games in a row went south. As I finished the last unfinishable game, it struck me that there is a great lesson in this game for all of us.

Think back to when it was a real card game: you shuffled, you did what you could, if you lost and had time, you would shuffle again and once again do what you could. The computer version is not much different except you don’t have to shuffle and you can play more games in less time.

Do you ever get frustrated when you have a losing streak or a high when you have a winning streak? Do you ever blame the losses on yourself? Do you ever think that every game is winnable? Does that idea make you feel inept?

Probably not. We play on and on, losing or winning, maybe for the mindlessness of the game, or maybe for some real reason. Who knows? What we don’t do is point the finger at ourselves for our not winning, no matter how many times we replay the same hand. We know this is just a game, a game of chance, and what we don’t take wins or losses very seriously. Like our dogs, we do it again, or not.

But then we walk out into the world, if we do something wrong, or if we just do what we always do:often, if it doesn’t work, we blame ourselves.

A hand of cards or real life: what’s the difference? Even if we messed up in the card game, we really don’t blame ourselves: we deal another hand or we put the game up and come back and play it another time. We don’t blame ourselves. It is what it is.

So why do we blame ourselves in our daily lives? Why do we look at mistakes and blame ourselves for those mistakes?

Why don’t we do what Bill Thurston, a very wise CEO, taught me years ago. Bill told me that a mistake is nothing more than a missed take. Like a photographer, he said, we should take it again, and again, and again. No reason to blame ourselves. None at all: it is just about either taking it again or not, and that is up to us. Win or lose: It is just what it is. If it is a mistake, a missed take, take it again . . . if you want to.

This is something that should be taught to everyone when they first start school or home schooling. A mistake is just a missed take: you can always take it again. It in itself says nothing about us; all it says is that it may need to be redone a different way.