My advice for any young person required to read Moby Dick during this school year...

A young friend held up a paperback copy of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's epic and allegorical novel about the voyage of the whaling ship, the Pequod, the ship's variegated crew, and its tyrannical Captain Ahab and their pursuit of the great, ferocious white sperm whale, Moby Dick. Captain Ahab drives his harpooners and mates to kill Moby Dick, to whom Ahab had lost a leg in an earlier encounter. Starbuck, the thought-filled first mate of the Pequod, and other members of his crew -- Stubb and Flask, most notably -- are joined by the "savage cannibal," Queequeg, and other harpooners -- a native American, Tashtego, a giant African, Daggoo, and the sinister Persian, Fedallah -- join to fulfill Ahab's single minded, obsessive desire to destroy the Great White. Moby-Dick begins with its fictional narrator's famous line, "Call me Ishmael," perhaps one of the most famous openings in American literature.

The paperback volume my young friend held did not seem quite thick enough for the original. Melville's book is a long work that often is abridged for young and modern readers. In its virgin form, Moby-Dick is peppered with what seem now to be odd sailing terms and references to the sensibilities of 1850s seafaring, making the manuscript certainly tough slogging for most of the dot.com generation and for anyone accustomed to maintaining any more than the one-hour-and-out attention span required to watch a History Channel treatment of a topic. No, the real Moby-Dick is difficult for most young readers even to carry, let alone read.

Melville had extensive experience at sea. He served as a cabin boy, as a seaman on the frigate United States, as a harpooner out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and as a member of the crew on a whaling ship, Acushnet, in the South Seas, from which he reported jumped ship and lived among native people for three years. Yet, with all the fog and foam conjured on its pages, Moby-Dick was written in land-locked western Massachusetts from Melville's knowledge and experience with the sea and whaling.

I feel sure, as he wrote Moby-Dick, Melville had to create scenes, dialog, and a flow as though the whole story was played out in front of him. In the green hills around Pittsford, Massachusetts, the only water of significance would result from drops on the trees and through the little dales in cool emergent spring, during languid summer afternoons, and on magnificent, dappled fall's canvass of spent life waiting for the first frost. So far from the vast green sea, without the rolling dark waves, without the briny smell of boiling sea water pressed outward by the prow of the ship, Melville wrote such passages as in Chapter 51, The Spirit-Spout,

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

Or, as in Chapter 111, The Pacific,

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potter's Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

Or, in Chapter 132, The Symphony,

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in his sleep.

If you can read these passages without hearing the sign-song creak of the mast, without smelling the new and old life and death in the sea parted by the ship, without feeling in the palm of your tar-stained hand the snag of a sliver from the deck rail, or without seeing in your long gaze the gentle curve of the horizon melding with the infinite, without rocking to the pitch and yaw of the ship as it charges in a wild reach, then you just might not be concentrating.

Perhaps the secret to penetrating what seems to us as turgid prose from a long gone era is to actually make Moby-Dick with Melville, not merely read it. Although Melville put down his pen as he finished writing his signature work almost 160 years ago, Moby-Dick is new to us and occurs again as we read it...every time we read it. This is the magic and sacredness of books that no film could ever hope to match, no matter what budget or artistry is behind it. Every time we read and re-read a book, the story is told with fresh, new meaning because the story is not a story with meaning to us until we imagine and fill in the cracks with our own thoughts, colors, smells, and textures. In this way, no one reads Moby-Dick in the same way as any other person. In fact, like some sort of Alzheimer's patients, we read a book differently every time we encounter it.

So, my advice, my dear young friend: read Moby-Dick without worrying about finishing it, no matter what you teacher requires. Buy the unabridged version. Savor the words. Build the story in your mind's eye. Enjoy the poetry of it all. For one day you will have a Great White of your own to slay, when the deep moans 'round with many voices, when you will need already to have had practice with the reckless pursuit of demons without a thought for your own peril.

Really not much coffee at all today.

Lifehacker...

At Penn College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to attend a meeting at which a presentation is being made on "mystery shoppers." Standard, big-urn coffee in white ceramic cups. Acceptable.

Up to a full rolling boil...

Things are heating up plenty around here as Penn State draws close to the opening of the Fall Semester. Tomorrow, Rose Baker and I travel to the Penn State Beaver Campus (35 miles north of Pittsburgh) to do a one day seminar, Nuts and Bolts of Your Regional Economy. On Friday, we attend a meeting of the Central Pennsylvania Workforce Development Corporation in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (better known by some of you as the home of the Little League World Series.

Coffee this morning is Hazelnut.

Featured post...

I just found out that Howard made my posting, "Dog of My Dreams...,"  the featured Motime post of the day.

Thank you, Howard.

Dog of my dreams...

When I was about eight years old, my parents took me to the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York. Lots of farm equipment, farm animals, and a midway. I won this ashtray by landing a pingpong ball in a fish bowl:

I could have had the live fish, but I took the cheap ceramic dog on the edge of the ashtray, instead.

This little blue dog with the sad eyes sat on my dresser for years. He held bits of pencils, knives, chewing gum, and later, as you can see from the burn marks, cones of incense. He was dusted once or twice over the years, The yellow discoloration on him is from my parents 2 packs-a-day (each) smoking.

This little dog is a figure in one of the most meaningful dreams of my life.

When I was a junior in high school, my father came home from work one day via the emergency room. A large steel plate, the size of a piece of standard plywood sheeting, had grazed the front of his body. He had cuts on his face and bruises all down his body where the plate had fallen forward and scraped him. Luckily he wasn't underneath the plate.

My father worked hard. He had been a personnel and safety director of his battery manufacturing plant, but, when the firm was purchased by an automobile manufacturer, many men were released from work. He was fortunate to be rehired in the place he had started years before--as a laborer.

He plowed snow. He shoveled keystone (very fine grain coal), sometimes for an entire day, guiding the gritty black stuff from a rail car into a silo. He would return home exhausted. Coal black. In need of a single shot of Black Velvet, some dinner, and some sleep. I don't think he ever made over $10,000 per year, even though he amassed a huge amount of overtime.

Funny, although he had been a member of the management, he was rehired to work side by side with many of the people he originally had hired and supervised. Then, he became president of the union. Eventually he served on the state workers compensation board, where I first learned from perusing his meeting minutes, what an arm, leg, eye, or life was worth in compensatory terms.

Well, the steel plate accident was the straw the broke the camel's back. His health began to deteriorate. It became difficult for him to walk. He seemed disoriented. Clearly, something was wrong. He filed for a disability retirement when he was 55 years old.

That was not an easy time. His company, for which he had worked for 38 years, denied his disability retirement claim and tried to blame his current difficulties on a war time injury. He had broken his femur while jumping on an Army truck. We were without money of any sort coming in. The government denied that he had a claim against them. His company refused to budge. My parents used the last of their savings. They sold their war bonds. They cashed in their life insurance. I never really saw my mother cry before so bitterly. My father was very sad.

As a teenager, you don't know what to make of the world around you crumbling. Moreover, you don't know what to say. You just watch. Quietly. Keep your thoughts to yourself. Indignity after indignity experienced by people who always paid their way, but , now, were without resources. My uncle brought us food. I wondered, where were those people to whom my father took clothes and food when he was a member of the St. Vincent De Paul Society? Where were the nuns and priests of the church which he had served for years and for whom I had been a faithful alter boy since I was 10 years old? We certainly needed them, but I suppose it would have been even more humiliating to have had their help. No, tough it out alone. Ask for no help.

The next year, I did not go out for the football team, even though it was my senior year. Let's face it, I wasn't very good. But, I preferred to be alone. I threw the shotput and discuss, solitary events which leave a lot of time for thinking.

I did not apply for enrollment in any college. I started working as a truck driver the Monday after my high school graduation. I found a job at a Kimberly Clark paper mill. I felt an obligation to be the bread winner.

After about one-half year, our money situation stabilized. My father received social security disability payments, and so did I as his son. He was awarded a disability pension. When the chance to go to school arrived, I took it, with my parents blessings and encouragement. I am sure it was a financial hardship. In the sprint from by undergraduate degree to my PhD, I only took one summer off to work at a hospital. I felt as though I never would get such a chance again.

My father was ill, sometimes very ill. His ability to walk continued to deteriorate. He was in and out of the hospital. Pneumonia. All sorts of complications of not being able to move well. The onset of diabetes added to it. He required constant care, which my mother gave without a whimper. We could not afford a wheelchair, so my mother would drag a rug with my father on a plain kitchen chair to move him around the house. It was, I am sure, exhausting.

In the summer of 1969, poised between the last course for my baccalaureate degree and a move from Niagara Falls, New York, to Bowling Green, Ohio, to start my masters degree, I was very anxious. No one told me not to go, but I felt very guilty leaving my mother and father alone to fend for themselves. When my father needed to be lifted, moved, shaved, and the like, I did it. I was leaving my home for good. What would they do? No one said a word about all this, but it festered in my conscience like an ugly, infected boil.

Then, one night in the summer of 1969, I had a vivid dream, one whose colors, smells, sounds, and temperature I can sense to this day.

In this dream I spoke to my parents in our kitchen, and, then, ascended our stairs to a second floor that was musty because all we did was store old things in the two bedrooms about our little box house first floor. Amazingly, there was another door--we did not have a third floor, but there it was, a door. I walked through the door and up the steps it opened to.

As I reached the top of the stairs, I was high above the city on a rectangular platform. Above was a black, coal black, sky with a thousand vivid points of light. Stars, some white hot, others red, green, and blue. The air was cool and comfortable.

I turned to see my parents standing behind me smiling in a way that I had not seen in many years. They seems satisfied, happy, and expectant, although they did not utter a word.

They led me to a corner of this open roof. There, inside a doorway, was a room. A room I had not seen for many years.

It was the room I had when I was eight years old.

In the center of the room was my old twin bed, cheap wooden headboard and footboard painted in a pastel gloss. On the bed was a worn, fuzzy bedspread. Embroidered on the bedspread was a picture of Roy Rogers and his horse, Trigger. There, in embroidered script below their likenesses, was the name, "Roy Rogers and Trigger! " This was the bedspread on which for years I had bounced, assembled my toys, read my books, stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep.

A small lamp was lit to cast a low, orange glow over the area. My dresser was to the left of the bed. On the dresser was an airplane I had assembled from a kit.

I moved to the side of the bed to see the dresser better. On the corner of the top of the dresser was my little blue ceramic dog cradling his bits of pencils, knives, and chewing gum, just as I remembered him. The little blue dog had been in my room really all those years, but he had receded into the background under shirts, clothes, and the detritus accumulated by a young person. But, here he was in my dream, fresh as the day I first put him to work to hold my favorite possessions.

I turned 180 degrees to see my parents looking at me with simple, reassuring smiles. They were close, holding hands, one arm of each around the other. The look they had showed complete love and acceptance. A look of happy, anticipation was on their faces. It is shocking how palpable this image seems to me now.

My father gestured toward to bedroom. Even though he said nothing, I felt as though he was offering it to me. As a place of refuge, as a place of love and acceptance, as home.

The warmth of his gesture and the looks on their faces said I could have this place forever, that I could be safe and secure, that I could be loved. All I had to do was to ask.

I said to them, "No, thank you."

They both smiled. My mother said, "Yes, we figured so." "Now, go ahead." she said softly and kindly and with a smile.

As though dragged by a wind down a tunnel, I woke instantly. I snapped upright in my bed. I was confused about my location for a bit. I listened, but all I could hear was the song of tree frogs calling in the night.

It was 4:00 am. I left my bed, walked to the front porch, and stared at the horizon until the sun came up.

It was amazing, but a burden was lifted from me. I felt, what I should have known already, that my parents wanted the best for my future, even if it the burden lifted from me would add to their burden.

And this is the way it is. Parents sacrifice for their children. Many times, the children never recognize what great love parents have for them and what huge sacrifices the parents make for them. Many times, the parents never realize the esteem with which their children hold them. But, gratitude is not something that factors into pure, unconditional love, is it?

So, in the end, my dream taught me that my parents wanted my success, not my dependency. The dream summarized and crystallized what I knew in my heart.

My little blue dog was there in life and in my dream. He had been sitting, with those big puppy eyes, in a dark corner of my family room in State College, Pennsylvania, waiting for me. I found him yesterday, buffed him up, and brought him to my office, where I will enshrine him and entrust him in a spot in which I have set my whole heart.

My first coffee today was a dark roast, only mildly hot, from Uni-Mart convenience store. Dreams have a deeper aroma, a darker depth than any coffee.