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| The
Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central
Ohio. |
Busted flat in Montgomery, I learned to write of crops. And livestock. My folks never wanted to find me dancing for coins on the street corner to make a living. So they insisted that I learn at least one skill in high school that I could trade for cash in an emergency. I signed up for a typing course, without much hope of being any good at it. After all, I'd taken piano lessons for three years without ever mastering the scales. Ask my fingers to pick out a C or an F sharp, and all you got from them was a blank stare. Strangely, when I sat down at the typewriter keyboard, my fingers knew instinctively where to find the letters. Words apparently made more sense to them than music did. By the end of the course, I could type upwards of 80 words a minute on a manual typewriter. My parents rested easier. As long as I could type, I'd never starve.
I made money at Ole Miss typing term papers for classmates and guys in my dorm, to buy beer and weekends in Memphis. But the skill never came in so handy as when I found myself broke in Montgomery, Alabama, some years later. This was far from the happiest period in my life. I was well out of college and temporarily derailed from my career track, stuck in a city I could never call home. To me, all roads led away from Montgomery. But I was too poor to take any of them. As the state capital, Montgomery is a government city, its streets lined with alabaster-like state office buildings that make its downtown look like a smorgasbord of wedding cakes. Penniless and dejected, I walked into one of those wedding cakes one morning, took a typing test in a civil service office, wowed the examiners with my nimble fingers, and walked out with offers from various agencies that wanted me to come on board as a Clerk Typist II. I didn't care for most of their offers. The welfare and social services offices were depressing. The Department of Roads and Bridges would have been a constant reminder that I was stuck in Montgomery. On the other hand, the people at the bureau that issued hunting and fishing licenses were a lot of fun, and I almost accepted their offer before getting intrigued by a USDA agency called the "Crop and Livestock Reporting Service." As a federal office that used state employees, they'd give me more holidays than the great state of Alabama could offer.
Most people know what Crop and Livestock Reporting does, even if they've never heard of it by name. It's the branch of the Agriculture Department that reports how good (or how bad) every year's harvest is going to be. It's an agency of statisticians and agronomists who contact farmers with questions about how many acres of wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton, sorghum and rice they planted in any given month, how many bushels of those same crops they harvested, how many pigs or chickens or lambs or cows they butchered or sent to market, and how many new animals they acquired through breeding or purchase. My job was to type the statisticians' reports about Alabama's poultry reserves, field pea acreage, heat indexes and so on. I also sorted mail, assisted the printer with the offset press, and occasionally called farmers who had failed to send in their monthly reports. I hated making those phone calls. Three out of four delinquent farmers were patriots who resented big government snooping into what was happening on their farms. The fourth always turned out to be a tragic case straight out of the Old Testament, with a dying wife and six starving children, who couldn't fill out the forms because his hands had been crippled by osteoarthritis. I disliked being cursed at by the patriots, but I really hated having to pester the Jobs of rural Alabama. Next: The poet statistician |
Father
Zorro and the Statisticians