Good At Arabic Syntax; Not So Good At Answering The Door. Pity The Poor Paper Boy!

In Hot Pursuit Of That Cute Girl With The Oriental Last Name. 

--By Charley

Set the WayBack Machine, Sherman.  The date: September 1970.  The place: 12074 Milton St.  Wheaton, MD.

Intense Jig-Sawing. Charley & Dad.

A nervous young man, a high school junior, climbs the five concrete steps to the front entrance of the house, opens the storm door, and knocks on the wooden entrance door.  He really wants to see that cute girl with the oriental last name who sits behind him in French class.  His heart pounds almost out of his chest and sweat beads on his brow.  No answer.  He knocks a second time, a bit louder than the first.

After a minute or so, the doorknob turns and the door slowly swings open.  A tall man with glasses low on his nose and an open book in his hand looks out.  His blue-ish sweater is mis-buttoned by one button…maybe two.   A long pause as the two establish eye contact. 

“Hi, is Mary home?” the young man asks.

“Just a minute”, the man replies, then slams the wooden door shut.

The young man stares at the wooden door and waits…and waits…and waits.  Perhaps forty-five minutes pass.  It seemed longer.  The young man debates leaving.  This is totally uncool, he thinks to himself.  Mary probably doesn’t want to see me, he decides.  Right now she’s slipping out some back door and running away.  What if someone sees me standing here this long?  Boy my shoulder is tired from holding this storm door open for most of the afternoon, is the next thought.  At no time did he consider knocking again.

Just at the moment that the young man starts to slither back down the steps in failure, the wooden door opens revealing an attractive mid-forty-ish woman with a small wad of money in her hand.  She extends the handful of money.  “How much is it?” she asks.

“Huh?” is the best the young man can muster.

Before the woman can say another thing, Mary peers around the door and elbows her mother out of the way.  “Hi!” she exclaims.  “Come on in.  How long have you been standing here?”

“Just a minute or so ”, he replies.

“But I heard you knock like an hour ago.”

“I thought he was the paper boy” the tall man mumbles without looking up from his book.

The Grandfather Of My Two Kids. 

That was my first encounter with Bob Wysong, my future father-in-law, and grandfather to my two kids, Caroline and William. 

Over the next several years Mary and I would go on dates or at least see each other, mostly at her house, almost daily.  Most dates would end with a two-hour-ish epilogue, which involved Mr. Wysong towering over me, and expounding on Arabic syntax or glottal stops or the hydraulic leveling system found in Citroen automobiles.

Summer Breakfast 

One of the most memorable exchanges was one evening around Christmas.  Mr Wysong was telling me about how words can be de-constructed into their roots when a small moth fluttered by and landed on a needle of the Christmas tree.  “Ahh!  Lepidoptera!” he exclaimed in mid sentence. 

I resorted to my good old stand-by reply.  “Huh?”

“You know…Lipidoptera.  Scale-Winged.  Lepi…leprosy…scaly.  Ptera.  Winged.  Like Helicopter…Helico…spiral…ptera…winged.  Helicopter.  Spiral-Wing.  Lepidoptera.  Scaley –winged.” 

His short lecture was like a nuke going off in my linguistically vacuous mind.  I walked around school for about a month telling anyone who would listen about moths and leprosy and helicopters and my friends thought I’d gone nuts.  I have never again looked at words as just sounds to be memorized and associated with objects.  Every time I think about the roots of a word I think of Mr. Wysong’s talk about lepidoptera. 

In the forty-five years since Bob Wysong slammed the door in my face, we have had many talks about many topics from Apple computers, to bread making, to how you could tell a sycamore tree because the bark smells like when you iron a blob of spit.  We even discussed how the banjo and the trumpet are basically the same instrument.  He set off lots of little knowledge nukes in my mind and I probably learned more of the practical world from Bob Wysong than from any of my many teachers. 

 Yet there were many times that I would just pretend to understand what he was talking about, thinking that if he ever found out how dull-witted and uninformed I really was, he would push me out that same wooden door and slam it again.  Only this time, knowing who he was slamming it on for real!  Or is it “whom he was slamming it on”?  Mr. Wysong would know for sure!

Charley Paddock

Son-in-law