Character Study

I first saw Bridge on the River Kwai when I was a little boy, maybe five or six. I was sick and sleeping in bed with my mother. The movie was playing on the 13″ black and white TV on her dresser. It was the late movie, the one that used to come on after the local news, and I was sick, but I stayed up, “glued to the TV” as my mom liked to say. I has been one of my favorite films ever since. It’s a great story, yes, and I’ve read the book by Pierre Boulle (the same author who wrote Planet of the Apes). BUt it has become for me an insight on how different those British blokes are from us Americans.

At the point in the film when William Holden’s character, an American navel officer who escaped from the Japanese concentration camp, is being being asked by a British officer, played by Jack Hawkins, to return with him and his team to blow up the bridge being built at the camp.

Holden says, “Do your intelligence people have any idea what happened to (British) Colonel Nicholson? He had the guts of a maniac. They were about to shoot him, and he didn’t bat an eye.”

And Hawkins responds, “I suppose if you’re about to be shot, there isn’t a great deal you can do.”

Not an American response. We are John Wayne. We are going to fight the dying of the light. The scene below shows that British character even more vividly, and it is the one scene I will still stay up to watch.

VIEW of Colonel Saito pacing in his quarters
and Colonel Nicholson being escorted inside.

COLONEL SAITO:
Good evening, Colonel.
Do you mind sitting over here?
I am having rather a late supper.
(Walking to table)
English corned beef.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
No, thank you.

COLONEL SAITO:
Produce of Scotland.
I prefer it to saki.
I spent three years in London, you know.
I studied at the London Polytechnic.
(Passing a drink to Colonel Nicholson)
Cheers.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Sorry.

COLONEL SAITO:
Later, perhaps.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Perhaps.

COLONEL SAITO:
I was not a good artist.
My father disapproved.
He felt I belonged in the army,
so I changed from art to engineering.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
I must tell you, Colonel Saito,
I intend to make a full report
of your activities in this camp.

COLONEL SAITO:
I do not think
you quite realize my position.
I must carry out my orders.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Oh, quite, quite.

COLONEL SAITO:
My orders are to complete the bridge
by the 12th day of May.
Time is short.
I only have 12 weeks.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
No doubt.

COLONEL SAITO:
Therefore, I am compelled
to use all available personnel.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
But no officers, except
in an administrative capacity.

COLONEL SAITO:
But officers are working
along the entire railway.
You know it! I know it!

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
I’m not responsible for the actions
of other commanding officers.
Personally, I’m appalled.

COLONEL SAITO:
Let us not get excited.
Will you have a cigar?

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
No, thank you.

COLONEL SAITO:
When I said all officers must work,
naturally I never meant you,
the commanding officer.
My orders were only intended
for officers below–

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
None of my officers
will do manual labor.

COLONEL SAITO:
Please.
I was about to say, I have been
thinking the matter over,
and decided to put majors and above
on administrative duties,
leaving only the junior officers
to lend a hand.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
I’m afraid not.
The Convention’s clear on that point.

COLONEL SAITO:
Do you know what will happen to me
if the bridge is not ready in time?

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
I haven’t the foggiest.

COLONEL SAITO:
I’ll have to kill myself.
What would you do if you are me?

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
I suppose if I were you,
I’d have to kill myself.
(Taking the drink from the table.)
Cheers.

COLONEL SAITO:
(Rising from the table.)
I warn you, Colonel.
If I am to die,
others will die before me.
Do you understand that?

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Major Clipton did mention
something to that effect.

COLONEL SAITO:
Well.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
That won’t solve your problem.
But I’m sure we can arrive
at a proper solution.
Please sit down.
(Colonel Saito sits back down.)
Now, tell me, Colonel,
do you or do you not agree that the
first job of an officer is command?

COLONEL SAITO:
Of course.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Good.
(Standing.)
Take this bridge of yours.
It’s quite an enormous undertaking.
And to be frank, I have grave doubts
whether your lieutenant, uh,
What’s his name?

COLONEL SAITO:
Mioura.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Mioura.
Is capable of tackling a job
of such importance.
On the other hand,
I have officers,
Reeves and Hughes for instance,
who’ve built bridges
all over India.
The men respect them.
It’s essential for an officer
to have that respect, I’m sure you agree.
If he loses it, he ceases to command.
And what happens then?
Demoralization and chaos.
A pretty poor commander I would be
if I allowed that to happen to my men.
(Taking another drink)

COLONEL SAITO:
(Standing)
Perhaps you are not aware
that the bridge is now
under my personal command.

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
Really?
And may I ask,
are you satisfied with the work?

COLONEL SAITO:
I am not!

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
You’ve proved my point.

COLONEL SAITO:
I hate the British!

You are defeated,
but you have no shame.

You are stubborn,
but have no pride.

You endure,
but you have no courage.

I hate the British!

COLONEL NICHOLSON:
It’s pointless going on like this.

COLONEL SAITO:
Stay there!

VIEW of Japanese officer entering room with
guards and removing Colonel Nicholson.

My Jack London

The Call of the Wild was the first adult book I ever read. Suddenly there were worlds arrayed around me on the bookshelves that filled the corners of my childhood home. I guess I was then like I am now, I had found something I liked and I looked for more. Next was White Fang and then The Sea-Wolf, adventures in worlds I would never know. Later in life I discovered there is also much political dissent and social commentary in London’s work. I embraced that, too. Not so much my belief in his beliefs, but in the straightforward style and stories that carried me along into his world of early 1900s America. I owe a great debt to Jack London. He, as much as any author, made reading an adventure and not just something I had to do for school. Here is a list of some of his works that set me upon the path of that adventure.

Martin Eden (1909)
White Fang (1906)
The Sea-Wolf (1904)
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Iron Heel (1908)
The Abysmal Brute (1913)
The Scarlet Plague (1912)
The Game (1905)
John Barleycorn (1913)
The Valley of the Moon (1913)

Optima

Print

Optima is a hybrid between a serif and sans serif font. Wikipedia classifies it as “humanist”. In font-speak, I guess that means it is a sans serif face with an anything goes attitude.

In the real world it works like a sans serif with a little flair. The ends of the letters are a little wider than the rest of the stroke and some letters use different stroke weights, like the “A” and the “M”, which reflects a classic Roman model. For us simple users it means we can get the legibility of a strong sans serif font and add a dash of character to the look. The only tricky part of using Optima is that the character widths vary significantly and custom kerning, especially in headlines, is usually required.

Optima was originally design by Hermann Zapf in the early 1950s. It has gone through several redesigns which really just added different weights to the basic Regular, Bold, Black and Italic variations. It is the font used for all the names of the fallen on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and is the official branding typeface for companies like Estée Lauder and Astin Martin (and if it is cool enough for James Bond’s car, it must be okay).

I am not usually a fan of hybrid fonts, kind of like I’m not a fan of hybrid cars, but Optima is a good choice when I’m looking for a softer feel. Chances are optima(l) it will find its way into my work again soon.

When Nanny Died

April Fool’s was dressed as Death. It came in silently, past midnight, into the hospital room where Nanny was dying. Joyce was catching catnaps on the vinyl hospital chair and didn’t hear the night steal Nanny’s soul away. She startled awake when she no longer heard her mother’s breathing through the layers of her sleep.

“Mother,” she whispered groggily. Her eyes were suddenly wide and she got out of the chair she was using as a bed. Death brought tears to her eyes with its finality. She gasped, “Oh, Momma. I was asleep.” The tears streamed down Joyce’s face and her chin quivered like a child’s.

Nanny had been in the hospital for only two days, but her illness had steadily progressed for more than three years. At first the doctors didn’t know why she couldn’t catch her breath. There was something wrong with her lungs, they knew, but the doctors in Texarkana were still country doctors really. They weren’t equipped to handle the technology of modern medicine. They were better at bedside manner and comforting the sick. When what Nanny had couldn’t be easily diagnosed, the doctor sent her to Little Rock for a biopsy. But the doctors in Little Rock weren’t much better than the doctors in Texarkana. The young intern who did the biopsy, still learning the ins and outs of being a country doctor himself, cut between the ribs of Nanny’s chest and found that the lungs were indeed damaged. Instead of taking a part of the lung that had just started to deteriorate, the intern took a piece that was already badly damaged. So when the specialists in Little Rock looked at the damaged bit of lung, they never could say for sure what had caused it to get that way.

Back to Texarkana and the little frame house on Fielden, Tyson took his wife. He had once been a strapping lion of a man, the product of a farm boy upbringing. He was more of a caged lion now, aging to uncomfortable paces. Tamed by the ever-presence of death that Nanny brought into the house.

As it became harder and harder for Nanny to fill up less and less of her lungs, Tyson took the necessary steps for her slow descent toward death.

He brought the big iron oxygen tank into the bedroom. It was big and silver and hissed quietly, all day long and all night long, as a reminder. The thin, clear tube that followed Nanny around the house connected her to the life of the iron tank’s oxygen and also to the ultimate end its appearance in the house prophesied.

Every week Tyson went to the pharmacy at the Skaggs to get Nanny’s medicine. The pills made her pudgy all over. Her face took on the look of the wise old owl in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, her sagging flesh filling in for the bushy feathers. Her slim-waisted body, sculpted in the Depression, thickened. Every day when she took the pills she raised the water glass to her mouth, but not too high to interfere with the oxygen that flowed into her nose through the divided clear plastic tube. Every day she gritted her teeth and fought back. It was a Texans-at-the-Alamo fight against the inevitable march of time, but still she was fighting.

While Nanny fought her private war, the summer sun came to dry out the earth in East Texas. The grass turned brown and you could almost see the heat attacking the defenseless ground in waves. The pine trees stood in clusters, evergreen, among the thirsting oaks and pecan trees. Neighbors came out onto their porches with fans and ice tea and sat in rocking chairs in the evening hours. But not Nanny, she was tethered to an oxygen tank by a plastic tube.

“I wish’t I would go ahead and die,” she told her husband.

But Tyson could do nothing. He stalked back and forth through the house, and died a little bit every day, just like Nanny. He longed to get outside and lay claim to his territory again. No. Tyson wanted Nanny to come with him so they could roam together. Instead, through the debilitating summer months and the relative cold of a Texarkana winter, the pair tried to form a new territory. It would be a limited landscape, but lush with love. Affection came closer to the surface than it had ever been between them. But as sure as death’s eminence, even the small portion of territory they had left, the house where they had lived and raised their daughter, was taken away from them.

“I can’t hardly get a breath at all,” Nanny told Tyson on a day when spring had finally broken through winter completely in the last week of March.

Tyson fixed Nanny up to a portable tank that she carried with her on the way to the hospital. From the hospital Tyson called their daughter. “Do you think y’all could come up here for awhile?” he asked Joyce. “I’m here at the hospital with Nanny.”

Joyce and her husband Arnie drove up the next day from Houston. The sun was setting on March 31st as they pulled into the driveway of the frame house, painted white, where Joyce had grown up. Her father was there waiting for them, standing behind the screen door.

“Her sister’s sitting up with her at the hospital,” Tyson told them, pushing open the screen door as Joyce and Arnie came up the porch steps.

“Evening, Tyson,” Arnie said.

“Let me fix you two something to eat and then I’m going to go sit with Mother up at the hospital, too,” Joyce said, coming inside.

“I done fixed something to eat,” her father said.

They sat in the kitchen and ate the fresh green beans and the chicken fried steaks, fried without batter in the big cast-iron skillet that was still sitting on the stove. Tyson munched slowly on the food, taking huge bites that took him several minutes to swallow. He looked frail to Joyce, an old man who had been mugged. Joyce had never thought of him as frail before. He was always the great lion of a man she remembered as a child. The image of him slouched over his plate at the kitchen table, chewing his food slowly and rhythmically like a milk cow chewing its cud, scarred deeply into her memory.

“Are you all right, Papa?” she asked.

“Not really,” Tyson answered her, pausing between bites.

When they were through with supper, Joyce cleared the plates and hand-washed them in the sink. “I’m going to go see Mother now,” she said after she was finished. “Why don’t you stay here with Papa, Arnie?”

“I want to go with you,” Tyson said.

“Why don’t we all drive over there together, Honey?” Arnie suggested. “That way I can bring Tyson back home if you decide you want to stay the night.”

“Let’s go then,” Joyce agreed. Her husband knew she would want to spend the night with Nanny. That was why she had planned on going over to the hospital alone.

The doctors were at their best when Joyce and Arnie and Tyson got to the hospital. There was nothing they could do for Nanny now except bedside banter and consoling the sick. Nanny was propped up with pillows and the life thread still connected her to the oxygen being pumped out of a gadget on the wall by the bed. Nanny’s sister was sitting on one of the two chairs in the room, leafing through a copy of McCall’s.

“How are you feeling, Momma?” Joyce asked as she came into the room.

“I just can’t get a breath,” Nanny said softly.

Nanny’s sister put down her magazine and said, “I’m going home now, I think. I’ll come back up in the morning,” she told Nanny.

“I’ll walk out with you,” Arnie said. “I want to find me a Diet Coke. Can I get y’all anything?” he asked the others.

They each shook their heads ‘no’, and Arnie walked out of the room with Nanny’s sister. When Arnie got back, he heard Nanny say, “You need to get home and get yourself some rest, Tyson,” as he opened the door. “Joyce can stay up here and sit with me awhile.”

Tyson kissed Nanny tenderly on her parted lips. “I’ll be back early in the morning,” he told his wife, and left slowly then with Arnie.

“He’s been worrying hisself sick about me,” Nanny told Joyce after the two men had left.

“Everybody’s worried about you,” Joyce said.

“I don’t see why,” Nanny answered with a bit of her old fire. “I’m dying and there ain’t nothing nobody can do about it. What’s the use of worrying about something like that?”

As they talked, Nanny’s breath grew shorter and she got tired. The nurse came and gave her the last medicine of the night around ten o’clock. Joyce turned out the lights and made herself as comfortable as she could be in one of the vinyl chairs. She watched Nanny silently for more than an hour, listening to her raspy, halting breaths and marking the severe changes in her mother.

As Joyce drifted into that lonely valley between asleep and awake, she saw herself playing with Rudy, her old hound dog, in the back yard of the house on Fielden. Across the half-acre garden a cat was harassing the birds that lived in the birdhouse attached on a pole to one of the posts of the back fence. Nanny came out on the back steps and said, “Rudy, go keep that cat away from them birds.” Rudy left Joyce and ran around the edge of the garden, straight toward the stray cat. But the cat was out of reach on top of the fence post and Rudy had to settle for barking before he came back to play. “That cat just won’t leave them poor birds alone,” Nanny said. She went back into the house and came out with Papa’s .22 rifle. She drew a bead on the cat and killed it with one shot clean through the head. Joyce startled awake and she couldn’t hear Nanny breathing anymore.

At Nanny’s funeral, Joyce thought her father had seemed to shrink. His shoulders were stooped and his chest looked caved in, like someone you couldn’t see had him in a bear hug. Throughout the funeral at the big Baptist church downtown, she kept watching her father and waiting for him to be released from the hug.

Then the preacher started talking about Nanny. Joyce hardly heard the words. Instead her mind saw a picture of Nanny in the kitchen. She stood, slim-waisted again in one of her simple homemade dresses without the oxygen cord, looking through the kitchen window above the sink at her husband out in the garden. Tyson was in his undershirt, his strong arms bigger than Joyce had ever seen, plowing the rows for the corn.

© 2010 Wasted Space Publishing