A Small Act of Heroism

The word “hero” has been used so much lately that I think it has lost some of its luster. So I’m a little reluctant to call the recent actions of my dog Tess and me heroic. But we did do what we could to relieve suffering of a fellow creature. And we did it without seeking any reward other than a feeling of joy—and maybe a little bemusement.

Here are the details.

Tess and I were taking a morning walk starting from our vacation home in the Berkshires toward a nearby lake. As we approached the lake, we saw a large group of young ducks milling about on the grass, which lay between two barriers—a metal fence that separated the road from the grass and a plastic slatted and gated fence that separated the grass from a small beach and the lake.

The ducks had gathered in this grassy area beside the lake

The ducks were noisily enjoying themselves pecking at the grass and at each other when something caused them to spook. It might have been Tess’s and my approach, though we were trying to be very quiet and had no intention of barging in on the ducks. In any case, the entire flock began panicking and fleeing. I think they must have been young ducks and perhaps couldn’t fly yet. (What do I know about duck development?) But all of the ducks found their way through a small opening beneath one of the gates in the plastic fence and raced into the water. All of the ducks except one.

The lone straggler must not have been paying attention as the other ducks escaped, and he couldn’t figure out how they had gotten beyond the fence. Tess and I watched as he walked along the slatted fence with increasing desperation, sticking his head into each slatted area and realizing that he couldn’t slip through.

Now, Tess has been in the same situation as the duck many times during our visits to the lake, and she has learned the secret of getting by the fence if she can’t get under it. She simply walks to the end of the fence and slips through an opening in bushes that border it. Simple for a determined dog and presumably simple for a duck too. But not our duck, who continued to pace back and forth like one of those fathers awaiting the birth of a baby in an old movie. And he was getting more desperate as he paced.

Tess might have been thinking it, and I called out to the duck to just keep going to the end of the fence. But neither of us could get through to the duck. At last, we decided to take matters into our own hands. We opened the first gate and walked across the grass toward the duck, who, not surprisingly, was nervous about seeing a dog and a human approaching. But we said some soothing words and proceeded right to a gate in the fence and opened it. Our duck scampered right through and into the lake. It might be my imagination, but I think the other ducks were laughing at their flock mate as he swam toward them.

Later, I told my daughter Amanda about our adventure, and she suggested that Tess and I were heroes. I blushed a little, but secretly I was pleased. We also decided to give our rescued duck a name. The consensus of those who heard the tale (and I shared it with lots of people) was to name him “Lucky,” as in “Lucky Duck.”

Now, this story should end here. But it doesn’t. Amazingly, on our morning walk two days later, we saw almost the same thing happen. One duck found himself all alone on the grassy area without any idea of how to reach the water where the rest of the flock were swimming joyfully. Could this really be Lucky again? This time, Tess and I didn’t hesitate. We walked right up to the fence, opened the gate, and watched the duck scamper through. So Tess and I had responded to another creature’s need and had come through again. Were we double heroes? We couldn’t be sure. But we did have a new name for our rescued duck — we called him “Dumb Luck.”

Lucky swims all by himself the next morning

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Compensation: The Real Meaning

I have been thinking about compensation lately and how the meaning of the word has changed for me as I approach age 70.

When I was a teenager—bagging groceries at the Foodtown on Henry Street—compensation meant the $1.15 an hour I was being paid at first. That’s what you earned in a minimum wage job in those days. When the minimum wage was increased to $1.25 soon afterward, my salary went up nearly 10 percent. Today, there is talk of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That seems like a huge increase to my 16-year-old self, but not nearly enough when viewed through my almost 70-year-old eyes.

Maybe I should have written a research paper on minimum wage in high school.

Luckily, during those teen years, I was often able to supplement my salary with tips I earned from carrying bags of groceries out to customers’ cars. Unluckily, I was expected to report the total of any tips I received. Then the reported total could be deducted from my pay for the day. (Full confession: sometimes I fibbed a little and reported only about 75% of the tips, which, unluckily, never amounted to more than $8, even on a great day.)

So what’s different for me about compensation today beyond the changes in minimum wage? It’s what I have to compensate for. A couple of years ago, I injured a tendon in my right forearm. My doctor diagnosed the injury as tennis elbow, which would be cool if I played tennis on even a semi-regular basis. No, I got the injury from carrying heavy suitcases up several flights of stairs while on a vacation in Denmark after a hotel elevator broke down. So, what I really have is suitcase elbow. Would it sound cooler if I called it Danish suitcase elbow?

Would this be more impressive in Danish?

Then, in recent weeks, I have felt a weakness behind one of my knees. I would try to describe it, but anyone nearing 70 like me probably knows what I am feeling. It’s a…a…a…weakness. Once again compensation has been required, so I have added an Ace knee brace to the Ace elbow brace I have kept around for use at the gym ever since my Danish adventure.

This leg has weathered nearly 70 years.

I fear as I actually reach 70—or beyond—that I am going to need additional compensation both for my physical shortcomings and in order to pay for new medical devices to compensate for them. My wife’s grandmother used to say, “It’s no fun getting old.” It’s also painful for your body, your psyche, and your wallet.

Everybody Needs an Editor

These days, I have more free time on my hands than I used to, so I have been listening to a series of lectures on CD by a professor of Hebrew and Bible studies at NYU on the history of the Bible. One of the early lectures focuses on the question of who wrote the Bible. There are no definitive answers to the question. Really, I didn’t expect a specific author credit other than perhaps Moses. But the scholarship is very interesting. What did surprise me was that the professor spends some time noting that the Bible had not only writers but also editors. 

As someone who sends out business cards proclaiming to be a “Writer/Editor,” I was glad that the editing role in the creation of the Bible was being acknowledged. Even if the writers were divinely inspired, they were bound to make some mistakes and overlook some inconsistencies. Hence, the need for editors. Of course, we editors also like to think we are divinely inspired. As I often tell my children (and anyone else I encounter), “Everybody needs an editor.”

Here is an example of Biblical editing that the lecturer noted. In Exodus, Chapter 12, verses 8–10, the Israelites are commanded to eat the flesh of the lamb that they slaughtered and whose blood they used to paint their doorposts so the Angel of Death would “pass over” their houses and spare their first born children. How should the lamb be cooked? The answer is stated directly: it should be roasted with fire and NOT boiled in water. Any parts that remain after the evening meal should be burned with fire in the morning. The details are pretty specific, so they must have seemed important to the writers of Exodus and to the people of Israel who were fleeing from Egypt and heading slowly toward Canaan.

The story of the Passover celebration meal is repeated later in the Bible, this time in Deuteronomy 16:7, where a different verb is used to describe the cooking process—one which involves boiling, though my Bible translates the term as “roast.” Not a big deal, most of us would probably think. But the discrepancy worried scholars over the years—and must have disturbed one or two Biblical editors too, because they now got involved. In a later book, II Chronicles (35:13), one or more editors took over when the lamb cooking process is again described, and this time included terms for BOTH roasting and boiling. The editors thus protected the egos of both previous sets of writers—an editing skill that is often underappreciated.

Over the years, my children have each asked me to review some of their compositions and to provide a little editing magic. We all decided that was not cheating, just improving. I found the best technique to use involved leaving the beginnings and endings of paragraphs pretty much intact while making needed adjustments in the middle sentences and adding an occasional transition or two. [It’s a little like those reading tests you see online where some of the letters inside words are transposed, but your mind makes the connections anyway.] It must have worked ok, because both children often got an ego boost in noting, “You really didn’t change anything much.” I would just nod.

  

All of which reminds me of perhaps my most memorable editing moment, which occurred the summer after I graduated from high school. I was working as an intern on the Savannah Evening Press, the local afternoon daily. The press run of the day’s paper was almost ready to begin. I was asked to give a quick (but thorough) read to the front page to make sure everything looked right. I spotted a pretty embarrassing error. The typesetter had left out the letter l in the word public. In Savannah, Georgia, in 1967, no one discussed anything pubic, especially on the front page of a newspaper. I was told to rush down to the press room, find a pressman, and say these memorable words—“Stop the Presses!!!” That is exactly what happened. Then a typesetter rushed in with a chisel and chipped off the letters “ic” from the word on the plate. The presses started up again, and 30,000 copies were run off with a blank space between the words pub and library on page 1.

In the old days, type was set by placing individual
metal letters into metal frames

I have spent much of the next 50 years editing as well as writing a wide range of materials, but I have never felt quite as heroic as at that moment in 1967. I can just imagine how the editors working on II Chronicles must have felt as they improved the Bible!

A pressman checks the presses. As I learned,
he can even stop the presses!