Once, while sitting in Paris’ Musee Rodin, I contemplated Auguste Rodin’s masterpiece sculpture, “Le Penseur” (1904), more commonly known as “The Thinker,” and I began to wonder what he was thinking about. I wondered what thoughts were rolling around in his cold, stone brain. Maybe he was wondering why he was sitting in the courtyard, naked, with pigeons sleeping on his head; or perhaps he thought of the 28 other life-size copies of his statue around the world, and wondered if they had a better view?
It occurred to me that he, like me, might be thinking about his regrets, mistakes, and missed opportunities. It struck me, too, that he might be dreaming of a “do over,” an opportunity to right a life full of wrongs, to clean the slate, to start over. Tell the truth – haven’t you ever wanted to hit the reset button on your life? To reboot your past? To say the smart come backs you didn’t think of when someone hurt your feelings? To speak truth to power when you were afraid of the consequences?
The older I become, the more I’d like a “do over” to straighten out the things I’ve messed up in my life. In the famous last sentence of his book, “The Order of Things” (1966), the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote that one day, “man would be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” At first glance, the image is troubling, but Foucault found it liberating – feeling a “profound sense of relief that human ideas and institutions aren’t fixed but can be endlessly refigured. The face in the sand is swept away, but a new picture is always being drawn in a different style.” For me, the possibility of “do overs” is as limitless as my failures in life, but here are some trivial ones that come to mind.
I’d spend more time in Paris. A few months in the “City of Lights” over a lifetime are not enough. That’s like eating the crumbs off the floor of western civilization. I’d spend more time in the Louvre, looking at the Mona Lisa (What’s going on behind that enigmatic smile? What does she know that we don’t?) and trying to figure out which way Venus de Milo’s lost arms really pointed. It’s strange. The one place in Paris you can’t see the Eiffel Tower is from the Eiffel Tower itself. For 5 minutes once per hour every hour from sunset until 0100, the Tower is lit up by 20,000 flashing bulbs. The best place to view it is from a boat floating down the Seine. Notre-Dame de Paris is still closed after the fire, but its little sister, La Sainte-Chapelle, is still open. Once reserved for royalty, the small chapel dates to the 13th century and has survived floods, fires, the French Revolution, the Commune, and two World Wars. I want to be there for the grand re-opening of the old cathedral. If nothing else, I’d just love to ride the subway, the best in the world, and get off to wander every arrondissement.
I’d take pictures. I’ve sailed every ocean and most of the seas. I’ve sailed around the world three times. I’m one of the few who made it to Vladivostok, San Paulo, Capetown, Bremerhaven, and into the Black Sea. I’ve watched the sun rise on the Amazon River and seen it set on the Sea of Japan. I saw pilgrims washing in the Ganges, and fog rolling across the Mekong. I walked along the Great Wall of China, and I climbed the Acropolis when I was 17. I was thrown out of a bullfight in Barcelona for cheering the bull, and I was chased by elephants in Kenya. I saw the Northern Lights flash across the sky in the Aleutian Islands, and I visited Paul Gauguin’s grave in French Polynesia. I rode a donkey up a mountain on the island of Majorca to hear someone play Chopin’s last piano, and I was arrested in Jamaica for walking on an airport runway when I was 18 – and I don’t have one photograph that someone else didn’t take.
I would buy a Hudson Hornet. When I was a kid, 9 or 10 years old, walking to school in Lumberton, I would stop at the bus station in town and loiter at the news stand, reading the car magazines. The kind owner let me read away, knowing that I didn’t have any money. My dream car was a 1952 Hudson Hornet. Launched in 1951, the Hornet was based on the deluxe-sized Commodore and its 124-in wheelbase, “Stepdown” platform. Its special feature was its engine, an over-engineered 262 CID flathead six, bored and stroked to 308 CID and rated at 145 horsepower, more than the state-of-the-art Oldsmobile Rocket 88 which came in at 135 horsepower. With dual Carter carburetors, the Hornet would put out an easy 170 horsepower. Hornets were all the rage at NASCAR through 1957, winning a lion’s share of races. It’s low-slung center of gravity made it one of the best handling cars of its era.
Later, when I was about 20, on my second ship, the USS Calaterra (DER-390), a World War II-era destroyer escort out of Newport, Rhode Island, the bus stop for transportation downtown happened to be alongside an Alfa Romeo import car dealership, and my preference changed. I had already been introduced to European cars after three years on the Mediterranean station, but the 1964 Alfa Giuila Sprint GT Coupe blew my mind. I could barely afford a bus ticket on second-class petty officer pay, so it was out of my price range, but it started me on a lifetime of collecting cheaper, mass-produced foreign cars. Today, my house is surrounded by 5 Fiats, 2 MGBs, 3 Mini Coopers, 1 Triumph, I Austin Healy, and 1 Citroen. None of them are worth much; they are just “yard ornaments,” and my wife is going to have a big clearance sale when I die. All this time, however, what I really wanted was a Hudson Hornet. I did come kind of close. The last car that the Hudson Car Company made before it was absorbed in a corporate merger was a Hudson-badged Nash Metropolitan. I have one, although it’s not running and needs a lot of work. I dug it out of a field just below Collins with a backhoe several years ago, and it’s sitting awaiting restoration. I may sell it for parts, however. I paid $500 for it, and I noticed on e-bay that somebody was asking $2100 for a convertible top assembly just like mine.
I would take more risks. Too often, I’ve taken the easy road, the safe bet. I’ve played the odds and been afraid to risk it all. Take careers, for example. I really wanted to be a commercial seaman but couldn’t figure it out. I should have just hitchhiked to Gulfport and showed up at a banana boat. Or gone to Vicksburg and worked my way up on a tugboat. Instead, I joined the Navy. “Three hots and a cot” and steady pay were too hard to pass up. I knew what to do. I should have enrolled in a nautical training college, like the Texas Maritime Academy or some such schools back east, but my high school grades were so bad that was a non-starter. Plus, I didn’t have any money. So, it was the Navy for me.
There was also the time I backed out of becoming an automobile mechanic. I decided it was too risky. When I retired from the Navy, I taught high school at Sumrall for five years. During the sixth year, I decided that I had rather work on cars, so I enrolled in Pearl River Community College’s two-year Automotive Mechanics program at Poplarville. It was/is a full-time program, and I really enjoyed it; although it was strange, because I was 65 years old in a classroom full of 18-year-olds. In fact, some of my former Sumrall students were now my classmates. I made all As and passed the ASC (National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence) tests in all the areas I was interested in (front-end alignment, brakes, tune ups, heating and air conditioning), and was getting ready to open my shop at a small farm in Lumberton I owned at the time. I got pretty good. I could even align a car’s front end with a piece of string. I was negotiating with the sales representative to buy my own front end alignment equipment. Then, I got cold feet. My problem was that I enjoyed doing the work, but I didn’t exactly like working with the customers. Based on my experience working on people’s cars, many want something for nothing and are never pleased. I also found I didn’t want to be tied down or deal with the public all day, which is the essential part of running a successful business. So much for that dream.
I would write more letters. All my seagoing life, I complained about not receiving any mail, even though I knew that, to receive letters, you must write letters. I didn’t, and I didn’t. Unless you are lucky, there’s not beaucoup people sitting around saying, “Well, I guess I’ll just go and write so and so a letter.” Mail is important. I once went two years without receiving a letter. It was my own fault. I remember the day, though, that I finally got one. One of my shipmates said, “Hornsby, there’s a letter on your bunk.” I would never have admitted it, but I was so excited! I ran and looked, and sure enough, there it was: a letter from the Lamar County Draft Board in Purvis, advising me that I had been drafted and that I should report to Jackson for my induction physical or face prosecution. I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony: I had been overseas in the Navy for more than two years. I knew what had happened. There were some religious conscientious objectors in my family back during World War II, and someone on the Draft Board with a long memory had decided to settle the score. I never received a real letter for a long time, but it was not a total loss. The mail to our compartment on the ship came wrapped in a red rubber band. I always got the rubber band and wore it as a good luck charm, and to this day I wear one on my right wrist for good luck.
I’ve been reading about the decline of personal letters and the lost art of letter writing, and I think it’s a shame. My personal feeling is that technology has made communication too impersonal. Let’s say that you were me, long ago, and that you were in love with a girl back in the states. What had you rather receive from her– a love letter or an e-mail? That letter might be a month old and probably would be, and that e-mail might have been sent this morning, but I’m going for the letter, hands down, and here’s why.
First, my girl went to the store and picked out the stationary just for me. I might even get a whiff of her perfume, which beats the heck out of the smell of diesel oil, foul air, and unwashed shipmates. The smell of honeysuckles is going to take me back home, at least in my mind.
Next, I’m no graphologist, or handwriting expert, but I can also tell a lot by her handwriting: how she felt that day, what mood she’s in, whether she was in a hurry, and I can even “read between the lines.” I might not want to open the next letter – it might start out “Dear John.”
Finally, and this might sound overly saccharine, and you had to have been there to understand: she kissed that envelope when she sealed it. You can laugh, but when nobody’s looking, I’m going to kiss it, too, and think of her, because what could a better “do over” possibly be?
Light a candle for me.
Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
