Pretty good is pretty good

September 2008

By Tom Snyder

I’ll bet most people who read this magazine have easily interested minds. That is a great quality to be born with since it increases the chance that one will have a lifetime of enduring encounters with interesting things.

I assume that you readers are susceptible to bouts of extended curiosity because the publication you are reading is not exactly Us Magazine – gossip doesn’t count as fascination. (Gossip actually has its own inexhaustible area of the brain. It’s the recently discovered “frontal hippo yactus,” and it has no little neural thingies that connect to the life of the mind.) But you, instead, have chosen to expend time and energy to find something new and fascinating within these pages.

You will not usually find any such thing in this particular column, but stick with me if you want to hear some gossip about one man’s life’s peculiar tango with fascination. It’s self gossip.

I am way, way too easily fascinated. Had I been born naturally competent, I would now be a Renaissance man. (The cool way to pronounce that word is with emphasis on the “ai“ syllable.) Instead, I always go through an elaborate and unnecessarily long sequence with every new fascination. Always have. It goes like this: 1. Get fascinated, 2. fall in love, 3. be required to do it correctly, 4. give up, 5. make a sneaky return.

At age 4, I discovered our new piano in the living room. According to my sister’s diary, the whole family endured my ceaseless experimenting with music. Mom was a saint and actually claimed to have enjoyed the horrific pounding. Stage 3 set in when somebody decided I was a candidate for piano lessons. After one lesson, I gave up my piano career.

A few years later, I made my sneaky return by learning to play along with the records of Rodgers and Hammerstein that were always on. I figured out that little three-note chords were the coin of the realm in western pop music. Today, I can noodle along to any song I hear, but to keep my fascination status intact, I claim to myself and everyone else that I can’t really play the piano. No one expects me to do it right.

Until I was 8, I spent an enormous amount of time with my best friend in the woods, in caves, and in all manner of forts. We rusted countless tools on rainy days, and on sunny days, we used our homemade sundials to get home in time for Howdy Doody. Seeing any forest from the car got my blood up. Stage 3 erupted when it was decided that I was a candidate for summer camp and then for the Cub Scouts of America. There is, apparently, a correct way to camp, plus, for some reason, you have to learn to box. Forest craft was measured by badges and some kind of pride that eluded me. I ended my mysterious friendship with the woods right about then, and sadly, Stage 5 has yet to commence. Generally speaking, I suck at the woods.

At 12, in the basement of our town library, I read a musty old pamphlet from 1930 that claimed it was possible to connect a battery to a collection of old-fashioned, electromechanical relays in such a way as to create little logic circuits that could actually compute something. Whatever that meant.

The local phone company was converting to touch-tone, so they were willing to part with a basket of such relays. I built a computer that was able to add any two numbers as long as the sum was no greater than seven. I sent a letter to the president of IBM with a one-page description of my supercomputer. A month later, a semi pulled up to our yard and left several crates full of high speed relays and a message from the president that said, “Think of us when you’re older!”

I built a monster of a machine powered by my electric-train transformer. I was hooked. I often came to dinner with bell-wire insulation stuck in my teeth. Stage 3 set in when it was decided by my school to enter me into a science fair at Brandeis University. I showed up and did not know the term for binary-coded decimal. I did not even get a mention. My tagboard marketing posters were especially poor. I gave up all of that digital nonsense then and there.

Fortunately, Stage 5 moved in when I became an elementary science teacher and could be simultaneously technically inexpert and a fun guy to have around students. We played our hearts out and I rediscovered my inner nerd.

This list goes on and on, as could I, but this is a boating magazine and you have been patient. At 10, my family moved near the water. During long summer days, I would stand fast in the cycling tide to experience it at every level south of my chin. Talk about patient, but this ocean was magical. I constructed complex rafts from available refuse and lawn furniture.

Dad gave me a small sailboat that was my favorite possession ever. I sailed always, sometimes deep into the ocean (sans life jacket). More impressive to me, I learned to approach a dock with speed, hard on the wind, bringing all hands to attention, and with centimeters to spare, turn into the wind, resting the little boat snugly, smugly along side. Stage 3 commenced when I was found to be an ideal candidate for sailing lessons and race week. I raced in Marblehead Stress Week – I mean Race Week – and immediately afterwards left sailing behind permanently. Well, until I was 46, when I bought a boat on the strict condition to myself that I will never have to really do it the right way. Stage 3 sailing is in remission because the closest I come to demands on my doing it right are in sailing magazines. I avoid them.

I have been cured of many fascinations in my life, strange cures that put me in arenas for which I am constitutionally unfit. The only cure for the cure is to remain steadfastly fascinated and only pretty good at stuff.

Tom Snyder sails out of Peaks Island, Maine.