My Favorite Hymns: Final Assessment

With great difficulty, I pruned my list to 25.

What have I gained out of all these hymns?

In my young and middle adulthood, I could learn any hymn in three verses. The first verse, I followed along. The second verse, I sang. The third verse, I sang out, I had it.

Now I can’t sing the even ones I love.

Do hymns influence what we believe? The elders chose hymns each Sunday to support their message. I don’t think that the hymns led me so much as reinforced my beliefs, but to have connected so quickly to “Once to Every man and Nation” I must have already believed a lot of the words. That’s pretty advanced thinking for a ten-year-old, but it is the thinking my church elders led me to. These are the hymns that still speak to me, the ones that I still hear.

The Final List:
20. “Break Thou the Bread of Life”
19. “I Know My Redeemer Lives”
18. “God of Grace and God of Glory”
17. “Were You There?”
16. “Shout to the Lord”
15. “Jesus Loves Me”
14. “God of Our Fathers, Whose All Mighty Hand”
13. “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”
12. “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love”
11. “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”
10. “Blest Be the Tie That Binds”
9. “Morning Has Broken”
8. “Give Thanks; We Gather Together; Let All Things Now Living; Come, Ye Thankful People, Come; O, Be Joyful in the Lord”
7. “Joy to the World”
6. “Amazing Grace”
5. “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee”
4. “The Doxology and Gloria Patri”
3. “O, God, Our Help in Ages Past”
2. “The Lord’s My Shepherd”
1. “Once to Every Man and Nation”

How to lose a customer

Amazon.com gave a demonstration this week of how to lose a customer.

I have done business with them for 10 years. One of the customer service representatives noted that there were 36 previous orders. This does not make me their best customer; it does make me a steady customer. Looking back, in 1998 I placed one order, the next year none, the next year three, but the year after that only one again. I believe that I placed other orders, but due to variations in the spelling of my name, they aren’t on here. However, to arrive at a total of 36 toward the end I was ordering steadily.

Essentially, Amazon built up a customer relationship, and then in one four day period, destroyed it.

To go back a little ways, the school my grandson attended had a magazine drive. Like any good grandmother, I bought magazines. Some I dropped after a year, some, I continued the next year. Last year, he no longer attended that school, so I renewed some of the subscriptions at Amazon.com. Still no problem.

This year, I attempted to renew some of those, a couple of others that I subscribed to because they had special low introductory rates, and a couple of others that would expire later in the year. At Amazon.com. Thirteen in all.

The problem: Amazon charged my credit card THIRTEEN times. After the first four, the credit card clearing house refused any additional charges. I am not faulting the credit card company. They acted to protect me. They had no idea what had happened: was my credit card stolen and being used fraudulently, was Amazon sending a whole series of orders under the same number when they should have been sent under different numbers. The clearing house had no way of knowing.

The worst was yet come. The clearing house blocked all transactions on my credit card.

I sent an email to Amazon. The response I got was to contact the magazines after I had “...successfully paid for your magazine subscription order....” (sic) Needless to say, this was no help. Parenthetically, I have almost never gotten any assistance from emailing a company. They seem to have a lot of stock email responses equivalent to “the cockroach letter” triggered by key phrases. I can’t ever remember actually getting any assistance from an email, but there is the possibility that once upon a time, I did. So I won’t say never.

Then I called Amazon.

And was forced to listen to them explain that I would get faster service if I sent them an email and that most questions could be answered by their help section. My feeling is that most people give up after getting one of those non-response emails or trying to find an answer on their help section. This way the company can go on its merry way and maybe lose some business, but hoping that people will forget that they had a problem and continue to do business with them. No pain for them. But no gain either.

The first so-called “customer service” representative did nothing but bleat “I’m sorry” and “I apologize.” She also claimed to have fixed the problem, but I knew all she had done was resubmit the order; I asked to speak to her supervisor. The only thing she did made things worse.

Note to companies: If a customer asked to speak to a supervisor, put one on the line. Do not put customers on hold until the system times out. Do not tell customers that there are no supervisors. Do not hang up. These strategies only make a dissatisfied customer more dissatisfied. The first representative did the first of these strategies. Later, several other representatives used others.

Some representatives said that if we got disconnected they would call back. They didn’t.

Note to companies: If you say you’ll call, call back.

Meanwhile I am getting emails from Amazon telling me that my credit card had been rejected and to please give them a different credit card number. I suppose that they wanted to mess up two accounts rather than just one.

I finally took the step of canceling the remaining parts of the order that had not processed. I did this because Amazon was making no effort to resolve the situation. The only possibility I could see was that if they tried to bill my credit card again it would be an endless round of the same problem.

Some of the representatives tried to tell me that I should have known that they would charge my credit card THIRTEEN times because in some obscure part of their directions it says that they won’t charge the credit card until delivery. I replied that I had in the past ordered an item that was temporarily out-of-stock and my credit card had not been charged until they were able to ship it. I had no way of knowing that this meant they would charge my credit card THIRTEEN times for this order.

Ironically, two of the magazines that did go through were the only two I could find the subscription renewal cards for.

As of Sunday, every time I didn’t get any assistance from calling them, I cancelled one of the magazines that had gone through. As of now, I am only keeping one of the subscriptions. Before anyone did anything to actually clear up the problem, i.e., faxing an explanation to the credit card company, I had to threaten to cancel the last remaining subscription and a previous unfilled order.

Sending an explanation to the credit card company was the first and most important thing I asked Amazon to do.

What did I expect? Well, first I expected them to send an explanation to the credit card company. Second, I expected them to repackage the order over several days so that it would go through. Had they done these two steps immediately, instead of bleating that they were sorry and stonewalling and hanging up, they would still have a steady customer.

Note to businesses: First, fix the problem; then say you’re sorry.

The latest is that on the fourth day of this ordeal, I received an email that I was getting a refund of $2.83 on an order that was almost a year old. I called to find out what was going on. I had not ordered anything that was $2.83. I was told that the price of something on the old order had dropped and they were adjusting it. The order was so old, I was pretty sure this wasn’t true. Then I was told that I had missed an issue and the magazine was refunding the price of that issue. I know what magazines do when an issue is returned. The magazine puts a hold on the subscription and waits for the subscriber to contact them. They do not issue a refund.

Amazon had the unmitigated gall to lie, rather than admit the truth – that they had messed up again. I called the magazine and found that their claims were not true.

Note to businesses: If you are going to lie, don’t lie about something that can be checked.

The final blow was an email follow-up to the original non-responsive email that was –non-responsive. Darn those customers, always getting in the way, expecting customers service.

I am not saying that I won’t order from Amazon again. If I exhaust all other possibilities, I may. BUT I’ll look everywhere else first, instead of going to them first.

My guess is that businesses think that if they lose a dissatisfied customer that will pick up other business’s dissatisfied customers. That dog will only hunt for a short while. Then it gives up and lies panting in the grass looking like it is saying “what?”

Take Sprint, for example. Their customer service was awful. I know because I’ve been a customer of theirs for eight years. That is also about to change. They have been losing ground in sales and also have been rank very low in customer service. Finally one of the highly paid executives noticed this and thought “well, gee, maybe we should improve customer service.”

The last time I had to call them and mentioned in passing that as soon as my current contract expires I am going to change providers, they informed me that they are trying to improve customer service. Too late. At this point, they would have to provide extraordinarily outstanding customer service for me to even consider staying with them. Which, I may add, they didn’t during that last call.

Businesses sometimes have the attitude that customers leave the first time something goes wrong. Most people will give a business another chance but will leave if the problem isn’t fixed.

Here is how to lose a customer:

First, make a mistake. If you never do that, you’ll never have a problem.

But since that is unlikely, the second thing to do is to claim you can’t do anything about it, refuse to try, and bleat that you’re sorry.

Next, refuse to put the customer through to a supervisor. Supervisors have more experience and often know ways to solve problems that the representatives do not. That is why they are supervisors. Correctly handled, everyone gains, the representative gains from learning, the customer gains from having the problem solved and the company still has a customer.

Finally, hang up on the customer.

Repeat endlessly.

Soon, you too will be losing business.

Rogers Heights Christian Church 1946-2007, Part 2

One of the reasons I remember the controversy about building a new sanctuary as opposed to enlarging the old one is that I was actually eligible to vote. I was baptized on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1955, by Lloyd Lambert.* I was 11 years, 8 months and 17 days old. This made me a member in good standing of the congregation; I could vote on the issue.

My parents wanted me to wait until I was 12, but in most of our churches there is a class in late winter for children wishing to be baptized at Easter. The tradition is that we make our “Confession of Faith” on Palm Sunday and are baptized on Easter. Not everyone does it this way, I had been lobbying to be baptized for two years prior. My parents gave in rather than make me wait another year until I was past my 12th birthday. I’m glad that I did though. Judi writes in her blog (http://thursdaychild-judi.blogspot.com/2007/09/rogers-heights-christian-church-1945.html) that she was baptized at Eastside Christian the following year because the sanctuary was torn up. It is the baptism itself that is important, of course, but still... I’m glad I talked them into it.

Five things I remember best from Rogers Heights:

1. Food
We had Fellowship dinners regularly. Probably once a month. The food was wonderful. Of course, it was plain, simple, midwestern fare, lovingly prepared. Nothing exotic. I think they call it comfort food now, and it is a heart-surgeon’s nightmare, but oh, my, it was good.

In the summers, we had ice cream socials. Home made ice cream, often hand cranked, accompanied by light fluffy cakes and pies with crusts to die for. We ate dinners in the fellowship hall, but the socials were held outside. I remember at least once, but probably more often, table set up on the side of the church where the parking lot is in Judi’s pictures before the three buildings were joined. The rich, cold ice cream melted in the summer heat. My mother’s ice cream recipe called for real cream and I think some of others used eggs. Plural. I’ve lived through a lot of hot summers since; nothing eases the heat like those summer evenings at church eating homemade ice cream.

I have a cookbook from those days written by the Christian Women’s Fellowship of the church. It is a treasure.

But also, I always looked forward to Vacation Bible School every summer partly because we got Koolaid. At my house we drank milk, water, fruit juice, (only for breakfast) unsweetened tea, and on rare occasions, lemonade. We didn’t get Koolaid even as a special treat.

2. Vacation Bible School
Another reason I liked Vacation Bible School was the craft projects. We did things like braiding lanyards and the like. One in particular has stuck with me as a kind of a question that I have never been able to answer. We took a piece of copper foil and embossed a design on it. I remember particularly a cowboy riding a bucking horse. I thought it looked great, but then, we wiped on some kind of coating that darkened the crevices making the design stand out more. Then, even though I thought it looked great at that stage, we did something else to it. And it looked great.

The question I have never answered is how does the artist know when something is finished? I know now the good ladies running the craft projects had some kind of kit that gave them explicit directions, but I didn’t know that then. I remember watching William Alexander’s Art classes on PBS and having the same question. At every stage it looked fine to me, so how did he know where to continue and when to stop. I’m always as afraid of going on and on until the project is ruined as I am of stopping before it has reached it maximum beauty. I still don’t know, but I think a lot of artistic ability is in knowing where to stop.

At Vacation Bible School, we sang “Jesus Loves Me” and “This Is My Father’s World.” We heard stories about children in the Bible and stories about our foreign missions. We had extended contact with the women of the church. Now we call them “mentor" and say they were mentoring us.

In the area at left, before we built the part that joined the three buildings,

(the higher roof line) we held Vacation Bible School.

3. Music
Sunday church services for me have always been about the music. I loved the singing. I sang in the choir as a teenager. I am working on a blog about my favorite hymns which I will post later. When I went to the Phillips University Centennial, I noted the beauty in the voices of people who just grew up singing in church.

I don’t think we had an organ in the early years. That suited me; I’ve never liked draggy old organs any way. My father grew up in the Church of Christ, our sister denomination. One of the causes of the schism between us -- we came form the same roots, the Campbell-Stone movement -- was the use of instrumental music. Some have down-played that division saying that the Churches of Christ in the beginning were making a virtue of necessity, but my grandfather truly believed that it was wrong to have instrumental music in the church. I will say this, Church of Christ services were beautiful, a capella voices rising straight to heaven.

Every year at Easter, we sang “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” and our voices carried such joy, such unforgettable joy.

We always sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” at the end of the service. I think that it helped to bind us together as a fellowship, as a congregation. Even those of us who were on the fringe of the circle were still tied to it. Ties? No, ropes, ropes as thick and strong as steel cable.

I still love hymns.

4. Bible
At Rogers Heights I got a thorough grounding in the Bible. We believe that the Bible was written at different times by different people. I noticed that Judi referred to it as a “library.” That is the way I have also always understood it. The Old Testament includes some history, some law, some myth, (yes, some myth) some sermons, some hymns, a collection of sayings, some poetry, even a couple of novels, and some writings that were found to be generally inspiring. It is a collection of books that the people found useful in their spiritual journey through life.

I believe that starting with Abraham it is basically true. There is some mythesizing, some “George Washington chopping down the cherry tree,” but it includes stories that aren’t particularly flattering to the leaders. I admire that kind of warts-and-all recording of history. That is part of why I believe it is true. Another thing I’ve noticed about the Old Testament is that it is the version of the rabbis who wrote it. Other people who were around at the time may well have had other versions of what occurred. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it happened, I just think the story might have been slanted a little different.

Thomas Campbell, one of the founders of our movement, said, "Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent." That pretty much sums it up. But of course, you have to know a lot about Bible to know where it speaks.

5. PEOPLE:
Most of all, I remember the people

Sometime after my aunt left us to continue her education at the University of Arkansas, my parents hired a couple of the teen age girls from the church to babysit. I wonder if the woman besides Judi who wrote a comment to the Tulsa World article was one of those teenage-girls. (http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=070818_1_A10_spanc71405) If so, she may the one I owe an apology. My sister and I were little angels for one of the sitters, but for some reason, we were as bad as we knew how to be for the other. I’m not sure why. I think we had heard stories from other children about defying the sitter and had to try them out. It was a valuable lesson to me as a teacher, sometimes kids just decide to act up. Don’t take it personally. I still wish I could apologize.

I wish I could thank all of the adults who guided us and taught us.

Of course, I remember the other children best.

To Patty and Priscilla who were two years older; to Jane’s brother whose name I can’t remember; to Barbara, Susan and Vickie who were a year older; to Judi, Janie, Jenny, Irene, Russell and Bobby who were in my class; to the Ryans; to Jane’s sister whose name may have been Karen; to Karen who was Priscilla’s sister; to Barry, Debbie, Mike, Susan; (and Timothy, may you rest in peace.) to others that I can recall, but not put a name to; God be with you.

The congregation has disbanded, but in a real sense, it is not dead. It lives on in the lives that were touched, in the contacts that we made, in the examples of the lives of the people who passed through the church.

Blest be the tie that binds.

*Judi’s memories and mine conflict a little about this. The short history in the cookbook gives July 1955 as the beginning g of Lloyd Lambert’s ministry. I can’t explain the discrepancy. All I can do is relate my memories.

Rogers Heights Christian Church 1946-2007

On a recent trip to my hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma, I discovered a “For Sale” sign in front of the church that I grew up in.

When I returned to my hotel room, I learned from the internet that the church had disbanded the previous year. I also discovered a blog written by a woman who had been my classmate in Sunday School all those many years ago when we were children. In it, she describes her childhood memories of the church and the last service there on August 2007. (http://thursdaychild-judi.blogspot.com/2007/09/rogers-heights-christian-church-1945.html)

Rogers Heights Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)
409 S Pittsburg Ave
Tulsa, OK 74112

This is a referral to the newspaper account of the closing of the church.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=070818_1_A10_spanc71405

I think we must have started attending Rogers Heights about the time that we moved back to Tulsa in1948. The Pastor, O. Edgar Wright, had baptized my mother when she was a student at Oklahoma A & M. (Now Oklahoma State University.)

Our denomination believes in adult baptism, or more correctly believer’s baptism. We believe it is a choice for the individual to make, not the right of his or her parents to make for him or her. In practice, people decide for themselves when they are ready to be baptized. Some feel that they are ready at a younger age than others. In our church some were baptized as young as 9 years old. My parents believed that one should not be baptized before the age of 12. I wanted to be baptized for at least two years before my parents would allow me to be. My mother waited until she was in college. She never discussed it with me, so when I found the certificate I was surprised.

I do, however, remember that we went there because of Ed Wright. My aunt who lived with us until the spring of 1949 has commented that Rogers Heights was probably the closest Christian Church to our home. That is true, but it would have been easier to go to First Christian downtown.

We must have started going there almost immediately after we moved into the house. What I can’t figure out is how we got to church. My aunt can’t remember either. I believe that we didn’t get a car until the fall of 1949. In the meanwhile, we walked or rode the bus or got rides. My father must have planned to ride the bus to work. I remember him sometimes waiting for the bus at the corner of 3rd and Columbia, but there was a man who lived on the street behind us who worked at the same place and did have a car, so my dad rode to work with him most of that year.

Yes, Virginia, people bought houses before they bought cars in those days.

My aunt was a student at Tulsa University. She walked me to and from school adjacent to the campus -- or later on meet me part of the way home – when they were sure I knew the way. I was in afternoon kindergarten.

Occasionally, and this part blows my mind, my mother would take me and my younger sister downtown, (It was less than 5 miles.) and when it was time for me to go to school, she would put me on a bus and tell the bus driver where to let me off. I don’t remember being lost or scared, what blows my mind is that the bus driver agreed to it and actually did see that I got off at the right place. I think that I did know where to get off and didn’t need much prompting, but of course, he didn’t know that.

My aunt remembers going to church at Rogers Heights, too, so we must have found a way. One possibility is that there was a bus on Sundays. I’ve lived in places where this would be unlikely, but it is possible. Another possibility is that we got a ride from someone in the church. The third possibility is that my grandfather came over and drove us to church. (Or even my uncle.) My grandparents attended First Christian in Tulsa for many years; my mother grew up in that church; my aunt and uncle met there. (Maybe both pairs of aunt and uncles did. I think that’s right.) I can’t imagine Grandfather driving us to church and then going on himself.

I don’t think we started going to Sunday School until after we got a car in the fall of 1949. I know that we held church services in what became the Fellowship Hall before the sanctuary was completed in 1949. Judi’s blog gives a better account of those days. I really don’t remember anytime before the sanctuary was build, but I “know” we met in the other building. Everything Judi says about that time rings true, but I have no identifiable memories of that time.

I turned 5 the summer after we moved to Tulsa. I believe that I always went to the church service. Now we have a children’s sermon and send the grade school children out of the sanctuary. At age 5 or 6, I was considered old enough to sit through the whole service. My sister may have gone to some kind or nursery during the service. She was 2 years younger.

I clearly remember three girls in my Sunday School class, Judi, Janie and Jenny. All three of these girls surnames began with the letter B. No wonder I never really felt like I fit in. My initials weren’t J.B.

The cornerstone on the sanctuary gives us the year 1949. Ed Wright left in the fall of that year. I do remember some discussion of leaving when he did, but maybe my parents had made friends. In any event, we stayed.

The education building below was built in the early fifties when J.R. Johnson was the minister. I remember playing in the foundations -- which we weren’t supposed to do.

In this picture, see where the brick stops and the yellow begins. That is painted-over cement block. The original plan was to build a second phase joining the first here. I remember those drawings. It would have been beautiful, but at the time the congregation couldn’t raise the money to build it. The compromise was to join the three buildings, education building, sanctuary, and fellowship hall, with the addition you see on the right probably around 1956. Judi explains some of this better than I do.

The architects drawing was for a sanctuary that matched the front of building photographed above, but with a projecting narthex topped by a steeple. The entry would have looked much like this entry. I don’t remember windows on the upper and lower floor. There would have probably tall gothic windows matching the one at the front of this building.

This is the front of the sanctuary. I remember the front walk as being longer than this. The world seems to have shrunk from the way I remember it.

My mother never liked to be early for anything. I can remember standing outside on this walk until the opening hymn began. Years later, I kidded her that I didn’t know what they did in church before the opening hymn because we never were there earlier. I went on that I had figured out that she liked to make an entrance, so every one knew she was there. That wasn’t very kind of me, I know, but I noticed she started to get to church on time.

Another aunt who had known my family from her childhood tells a story about my grandfather. My aunt’s father took up the offering in the Sunday School Class he and my grandfather attended. One day he found a twenty dollar bill in the collection. Understandably, he was concerned that someone had made a mistake. Twenty dollars was a lot of money in the twenties or thirties when this must have occurred. “No,” my grandfather said, “he had missed several Sundays and was just making up for it.” My aunt didn’t say this, but I thought how typical of him to make a show of his giving. The Bible quotes Jesus as saying that such have their reward.

The writer of the newspaper story about the closing of the church remarks that the demographics of the neighborhood were against us. I think the demographics were always against us. Even though I think that building would have been too large for the site, when the congregation was unable to complete the beautiful church the architect envisioned, the demographics were against us.

-

We persevered

-

Stand Up Comedy and the Art of Fine Writing

I took a class in Stand-Up Comedy because I thought my writing needed more humor. I was right about that, but I am not sure that the class itself helped with the humor.

On the other hand, I learned a lot.

One of the things that struck me as interesting was that I followed the instructor’s instructions to the letter. He commented about that -- because no one else did. (This was an adult education class, no grades.) I told him simply, "I am paying you to teach me something, I would be very stupid not to follow your instructions."

In my not-so-humble opinion, I had the best routine in the class. Every time I have done it, the audience has laughed. I couldn't get a better grade than that.

Why didn’t the others follow the instructions? Once again, I don’t know. My best guess is that they were there to validate their experiences, not to learn stand-up. Or they thought they knew more than the instructor did. Or they hadn’t listened to enough stand-up routines to understand the instructions. Or any combination of the above.

The parallel with the writers critique groups is that even if someone who knows what they are talking about tells them what to do, the members don’t listen. For pretty much the same reasons that the stand-up comedy students didn’t. I know that it is difficult to sort out the people who do know what needs to be done from those who don’t. But still --

I keep telling myself to shut up; I am wasting my time because even if I do know what I am talking about, the people in the groups have no way of knowing. I am only slightly published, nothing really worth mentioning -- outside of college periodicals. But I am not telling them anything that they can’t read for themselves in books that go beyond "don’t use helping verbs." Whether or not they use helping verbs, they won’t ever be good writers if they don’t learn a few facts about stories and storytelling.

There are plenty of books on story telling. See my list for a few to start with.

So why do I keep on going to critique groups? Well, they are nice people to hang out with, interested in some things that I am. So I keep going.

But if I like them -- and I do—I really want to help them succeed.

Frustration strikes again.

Helping verbs

Somewhere along the line, some members of writing groups have gotten the idea that it is wrong to use the progressive and perfect tenses. The ones with “helping verbs.” I have been reading all kinds of “how to” books on writing with style. So far I have been unable to track down this piece of misinformation, but I’m not giving up. I am going to find the charlatan who started this nonsense and expose him or her.

I can tell, though, which writers have bought this crazy idea.

You have seen the kind of amateur stage production where the actors stand around on stage with their hands metaphorically in their pockets waiting to deliver lines. When they get a cue they spring into action and deliver their lines with great feeling. Then they stick their hands back in their pockets and freeze -- waiting for their next line.

The characters in the prose of writers who have bought into the no-helping-verbs propaganda are like these amateur stage actors standing around waiting for their lines. They are never doing anything; they are never interrupted; they are just there – waiting for their cue.

One of my favorite nursery rhymes reads:

When I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
In each sack were seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, bags and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

This riddle was supposedly found scratched into a wall in the pyramids. That‘s how old it is.

Of course, you know the answer, one.

Now let us removing those all important “helping verbs” and make the verbs “stronger.” (You have also heard that removing them makes the verbs more active, less passive. I am not going there.)

When I went to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
In each sack were seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, bags and wives,
How many went to St.Ives?

The answer: I have no idea.

You see, I went to St. Ives.

There I was standing in the middle of the town square, perhaps looking over the gimcracks in the market, when this man grabs my sleeve and whispers, “Want a cat? I’ve got plenty of them.”

I turn around intrigued or dismayed or whatever, and he points, “See my seven wives over there, each one has seven sacks full of cats, just full of seven cats, every one of them has kittens, seven each. Please take some of these cats. I’ll give them to you.”

By now tears are running down his cheeks.

And my eyes are getting a little watery, too. “My wives, they can’t turn away a cat…”

You get the picture. How many of them went to St. Ives? Maybe all of them -- all 2,744 cats, plus the 49 sacks, plus the man and his seven wives, for a grand total of 2,801. Oh, I forgot, plus me, of course, 2,802. Or maybe the man and his wives were born in St.Ives. But in that case, I am quite sure that not all the cats were born in St. Ives.

I envision cats from all over the surrounding territory saying to one another, “You know if you are kicked out, there is a place over in St. Ives…”

I don’t know the answer to the riddle, how many went to St.Ives, if I don’t tell the story using helping verbs.

In poetry and, as I am beginning to discover, in fiction every word needs to count. Look how much bang for your buck you get using helping verbs. You get action; you get the cook interrupted in the middle of frying bacon by the stampede; you get that beloved of writers -- backstory; you get character development; you get so much packed into that little tiny word, that helping verb; you are shooting yourself in the foot if you don’t use it. Make it count for you.

Plus, when I am reading and find that the writer has used a simple verb when a progressive or perfect is correct, I notice. Don’t think those first readers at the publishers who graduated from some Ivy League college with a major in English Lit. don’t notice when you use the wrong verb. They do. They don’t think, “Wow! This writer knows how to write action.” They are much more likely to think, “This guy doesn’t know how to write proper English.” They know grammar. They expect the writer to be able to write a grammatical English sentence.

Besides most of the writers I knew have bigger problems, problems that won’t be solved by whether or not they use helping verbs.

The Drunkards Walk

There is an interesting problem in statistics called the “Drunkards Walk.” In this problem, we mentally lean a drunk up against a lamp pole in the middle of an intersection in the middle of the night. How he got there, we don’t know. Nor do we care. He staggers away from the pole. After each step, the drunk can move another step in any direction, including backwards. After a given number of paces, he falls. He lies there, face down on the pavement. We stand him up again, mark the place where he fell and lean him up against the light pole. We repeat this procedure over and over. It turns out that his multiple resting places form a normal curve with its peak in a circle around the lamp pole. The plotting of the “Drunkards Walk” has implications for the scattering of particles from the break up of nuclei, among other things.

The point of this story for writers is that we don’t care how the drunk got to the lamp post; all we care about is where he ended up – fell down as it were. In a story, we don’t usually care what led the main character to the place where our story starts. We care about how the drunk(i.e. main character) staggers around and where he falls down. And possibly what he does when he gets up. And how many times he goes back to leaning on the lamp post. Not how he got there.

The best writers limit the backstory to what we absolutely have to know – and then they cut out 50% of that. They feed it to us in little bits, when the question arises, when our curiosity is aroused, and not before we care enough to want to know. This is part of what makes them the best writers.

It turns out that we don’t really want or need to know very much.

Amateur writers are too often in love with backstory. They assert that the reader can’t understand the story without knowing the character’s life up until the interesting events occur. Baloney. The writer needs to know all this; the readers don’t.

So my best advice to amateur writers is remember our drunk leaning up against the lamp post -- and don’t tell us how he got there.