A quick word or two.

I knew a guy who made it all the way through college having just read the Cliff Notes of all the major books he was suppose to ingest for his degree in English.  You remember those yellow pamphlets that promised you a decent understanding of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Emily Bronte, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. You name it and he read it – in abbreviated form.

He used to joke at the apartment house that they were Allen Notes, not Cliff notes. His name was Allen.

And he was a high B student.  He once told me he wasn’t interested in “As”. He was interested in getting in and then out and getting a job. His degree was in English. He was, and I suppose still is, a really good writer.  He just was lazy and didn’t want to read all the assignments. So what does he do after graduation?  He decided to teach, which meant eventually he would probably get a masters.  He did.  And he used the same system getting a masters degree.

Hello academia, we have one who slipped through the cracks.

I saw him not long ago.  We sat and had a cup of coffee at a Starbucks and exchanged stories about our lives and our children and everything we had been doing over the past half-century. And he said something to me that made me sit up and take notice. “John, I’ve been readying some of the classic I missed in college.  I have been reading the actual books.  They are fantastic.”

“I tired not to act shocked. “What’s your favorite so far?’ I wanted to know.

“War and Peace..”

“What?” I nearly chocked on the hot coffee.  “Do you know how thick that books is? How did you ever make it through it?”

“You just read one word then the next then the next and before you know it, you are into the story and it just unfolds before you.”

“But you were Mr. Cliff Notes.  Mr. Short Cut To a Degree In Literature. I can’t believe you are reading not just books, but Big Books.”

“Yeah. I’m going to tackle Milton or Dickinson next. Something English.  Maybe Shakespeare this summer.”

I was flabbergasted. “How’s work going?” I asked.  He grinned. 

“Since I started reading books, I’m a much better teacher.”

Imagine that.

Then it struck me. How many of us in whatever walk of life we are traveling, have taken the short cut. – the easy access – have shaved a few corners? Yet, when we sit down to tackle our life’s work and we do it right, there is a great sense of joy that comes from those accomplishments.

English Lit for Dummies is not my idea of earning a BA or an MA from a university. But at least my friend has a teaching job, which he is dedicated to and truly loves and has discovered the joy of what was actually in those books.  He discovered that there was a real power to the art of placing one word right after the next in a certain context and delivering a message with style, substance, character and rhythm.

I sipped on my coffee feeling a bit proud of my old buddy becoming legit after all these years.  It was like coming out of the closet and saying, I’m illiterate, teach me to read.  It took a lot of courage for him to admit he had skimped and just gotten by.  But now he was a reading addict. “So, Allen, what are you going to be doing this summer during break?”

“Oh, I got a job editing for Spark Notes.”

And the circle goes on…unbroken.