If my husband ever has to list his life’s greatest accomplishments, it’ll be a tossup between helping steer three children toward responsibility and decency in a troubled world and the term paper he wrote on “Richard III and the Element of Time.”
His old term papers have never died. His footnotes have been following me around since the day we married.
“Did I ever tell you about that brilliant paper I wrote on Richard III?” he worked into the kitchen conversation shortly after our honeymoon.
“My professor couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Most people see Richard III as the main character, but I said that time was the main character. There are dozens of references to time. `Now is the winter of our discontent …”‘
“Umm,” I commented.
“You see, the Elizabethan view of time is one of natural order,” he said. “Everything happens in a universal rhythm. Richard III was too impatient, he tried to speed things up and threw the universal order out of whack. And it all fell down on him.”
“You don’t say,” I said.
That’s all the scholarly feedback, punctuated with a potato masher, from me he has ever needed. After all, he received the ultimate encouragement 20 years ago when his professor marked a big red A-minus on the paper “and,” my husband said, “made a point of saying the only reason for the minus was the paper was a day late.”
There’s that element of time again. I can’t get away from it. Even when we changed addresses four times in five years and weeded out a boatload of paper and clutter, Dick III moved with us each time.
“Don’t you dare throw away that research paper,” the author’s voice would boom out just as my hand dangled the paperclipped relic over the trash.
It really wouldn’t matter if I did manage to wrest the theme out of the basement box and hold a match under it because my husband has it memorized. This man, who stumbles over the numbers vital to everyday life, can recount every Roman numeral and non-Roman numeral in the outline that preceded this day-late 20-year-old term paper. He gets his Social Security number tangled with his video rental number,and his checking account number entwined with the combination lock on the garage door and the date of my birth, but he knows the exact number of references to time in Ricky III (56) and on what pages they appear.
I’ve tried to understand this object of his long-term affection. When we married I faithfully abided by the motto: “Love him, love his old term papers.”
But after bearing his three children and making his dental appointments and sharing his library fines, Richard III’s old bugaboo-time-had thrown my patience with old term papers out of sync. Frankly, until recently, I would like to have shot the teacher who assigned, then applauded, the masterpiece that haunts me.
My husband detected my boredom with his thesis the other night after he plunked little Richie into a conversation without even a stab at a logical transition: “Say, I really should try to get that paper published in one of those Shakespearean journals,” he started in. “Shucks, I remember I went through four pots of coffee before I got that thing typed without any mistakes.”
My ears perked.
“A typewriter? That was during pre-word processor days, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Yessirree. You had to rule out the margins lightly in pencil, then make sure the words didn’t march too far over the right-hand line. Only one erasure allowed per page. You couldn’t even use correcting fluid because it would blob and stick out like a polar bear on an ice cube.”
“No delete buttons, huh?”
“Are you kidding? One misplaced quote mark or comma and the whole page had to be retyped. A slip of the finger could wipe out a day’s work.”
I whistled in admiration.
“And it took me a day’s practice to shift that carriage to get those footnote numbers onto their proper perch. The worst thing of all was after I carefully worked out the blueprint for the spacing on the outline and typed out the first page, I spilled coffee on it and flooded the whole page. It was traumatic.”
“No memory retrieval,” we both said sadly. Now I understand.
