Light While There is Light by Keith Waldrop

Author:Keith Waldrop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NORTON

VIII

All his years in the navy, Charles bought books—and read them. He began making outlines and charts for each book, then for aggregates of books. Finally—I have a photo of him sitting outside a thatched hut in the Admiralty Islands, in the webbed helmet of the Amphibious Corps, no shirt; a nurse is visible on the other side of the hut, wearing what looks like her officer’s cap and otherwise nothing but a man’s T-shirt, but he is gazing straight into the camera with the sort of total smile professional men usually have to work for—finally deciding to graph the entire range of human knowledge. Most of his schemes resembled the traditional family tree of genealogists. There was one for the pure, another for the applied sciences, one for history, and a large one for psychoanalysis, with a Freudian trunk and limbs of Adler, Jung, Rank, and Sullivan, lots of smaller twigs, named and unnamed. In 1945 he was Chief Petty Officer and then, quite suddenly, a civilian. Fie had picked up a degree in meatcutting, the first of his many diplomas, from a navy school, but that counted for little. So he went to Boston and took a course at Fanny Farmer’s cooking school—on the G.I. Bill—then went in search of a job. He worked a single season as chef at a resort hotel on Cape Cod, then came to Kansas just as my mother, Elaine, and I were leaving for South Carolina. Mother’s parting words to him were, “Search the scriptures, son, and let the Lord have his way.”

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