“Like what?”
Thankfully I had just started chewing a piece of crab cake, so I had a few seconds to think. I had opened my fat yap without thinking. I held up a finger as a timeout while I chewed and swallowed, and then washed the bite down with my gin and tonic. “Okay, well, something simple. I was reading your papers. They had titles like, oh, ‘Adverse Oxidation Effects On Infrastructure Cost Scenarios’. Nobody outside of the engineering field will ever read that. What regular people will read, what politicians and newspaper people will read, is ‘Rusty Bridges Cost Money!’”
“Well, yes, but that’s not how technical papers get written!” he protested.
“I know that. I’ve written some myself. What I’m saying, though, is that if you want to get the attention of people who aren’t technical, you can’t write technical. You have to write in terms they can understand and relate to. They won’t understand scenarios. They’ll understand a bridge collapsing and their taxes going up. You need to gear your public information to the public,” I answered.
I continued, “That’s just one thing. I’m sure there are others. For instance, politicians love to be photographed opening a bridge or breaking ground doing something. You need to convince them that it’s just as sexy to be photographed filling in a pothole or placing a traffic cone on the street. Tell them how it makes them look practical and thrifty. Hit them over the head with dollars, not tech reports and journals.”
He smiled. “You sound like somebody without very much trust in our public servants.”
“I trust them to do whatever they think will get them re-elected. Convince them that filling potholes will get them re-elected, and they will fill in potholes.”
“That’s very cynical.”
“That’s very realistic,” I replied.
He thought for a second and said, “You should run for office.”
I practically spit out my drink. “Not in a million years!”
“Then how will you ever get things to change? If you don’t help, who will?”
“Figure out a different way, Professor. I haven’t sunk that low, yet,” I responded.
After our late dinner, I thanked Johnson for an interesting evening and went home. I got to bed around midnight. Marilyn was already fast asleep, with Dum-Dum warming my side of the bed. I let the dog out to pee in the back yard, and when she came back in she went to Charlie’s room. I climbed into my pre-warmed bed and fell asleep.
Friday morning Marilyn was snuggled up against me. As per our normal schedule, she woke up before me, and headed into the bathroom to get a shower first. Since Marilyn’s normal morning routine takes thirty-plus minutes, I caught a few more winks. Dum-Dum woke me a few minutes later and whined until I put her out in the back yard. While she peed, I went into the bathroom and did the same. I returned to let her in and then headed back to the bathroom for my shower and shave.
“Morning! How was your lecture?” asked Marilyn.
“Interesting, and it was a symposium, not a lecture.”
“Only you would care about the difference.”
I had to smile at that. “Sorry I got home so late. I ended up talking to the professor late. Did you stay up waiting for me?”
“No. After I got the kids to bed, I fell asleep on the couch.”
“Well, sorry about that.”
Just then, the girls came stumbling into our bathroom, gabbling about breakfast. I hastily wrapped a towel around my waist. “You two are going to get an anatomy lesson one of these days!” I protested.
“It’ll be a short lesson,” commented their mother.
“Oh, that is cold, lady! That is cold!”
Marilyn blew a raspberry at me and then herded the girls back out through the bedroom and down the hall. I hopped in the shower and did my morning ablutions in about half the time it takes Marilyn. On the other hand, a major portion of her regimen includes rubbing body lotion all over — and I mean all over. On kid free vacations, I tended to treat this as a spectator sport. I had decided that there was a certain downside to complaining about this use of her time.
That was about it for my re-immersion in the world of science, or so I thought. I took the afternoon off and we drove the kids up to Deep Creek Lake for the weekend. It’s very scenic up there in the springtime, and I remember that in another lifetime, Suzie and her family had frequently gone camping up there. Now Suzie wouldn’t be camping at Deep Creek.
In no possible way would I ever want to take Marilyn camping. No matter how much enjoyment I would get in watching her fumble around in the woods, it couldn’t possibly match the overall nuisance she would prove.
I knew this for an absolute fact, and a certain portion of my psyche, the dark and demented portion, longed for the day when she would attempt camping. The deal we had made back when she told me she was pregnant the first time was that I would do boy stuff and she would do girl stuff. So, I would be the adult with Charlie in the Boy Scouts, and Marilyn would join the Girl Scouts with Holly and Molly. Charlie was already a Tiger Cub, and I was his designated adult. Charlie was finding this to be loads of fun, and was looking forward to when he was old enough to go camping overnight, when he made it to Webelos. I was looking forward to the day when Marilyn had to go camping with the Brownies, or whatever age group of girls went camping. With any luck, one of the other parents would make a home movie, and I could bribe them into giving me a copy. I would be willing to pay a serious bribe to get movie footage of Marilyn stumbling around in the wilderness!
For this weekend, however, we simply stayed at a lakefront cabin and did some hiking and tourist type stuff. Sunday afternoon we drove back to Hereford and hosed off the kids and then put them to bed for a nap. Monday Marilyn would pick up Dum-Dum from the kennel and I would go back to the office.
By the end of the week, however, science reared its ugly head again. Harry Johnson called. “Doctor Buckman, I wanted to call again and thank you for coming to the symposium, and for dinner afterwards. I hope you didn’t get home too late.”
“Nothing I wasn’t expecting. Thank you for calling.”
“Do you remember how we were talking about what you could do to help me?” he asked.
My brow wrinkled at this. Either I had forgotten this part of the conversation, or Harry Johnson was a better salesman than I had figured. “I remember telling you I wasn’t ever going to run for office.”
He laughed at that. “I remember that, too. No, I’m talking about other things I could do to bring the problem to the public’s attention.”
That part I remembered. “Okay, I remember talking about that. Did you have something in mind?”
“We could write a book!”
I stared at my phone for a second. It almost sounded to me like Johnson had said something about writing a book. “Excuse me?”
“I said we could write a book.”
“That’s what I thought you said. For a second there I thought Timothy Leary had gotten loose with the LSD again. A book?”
Harry laughed. “I’m serious. Let me explain. Last fall I was approached by Simon and Schuster about a book on infrastructure. I turned them down. I tried to get started, but it was a disaster. You could make it better, a lot better.”
“I am definitely thinking that Timothy Leary is on the loose again.”
“Give me a chance. Let me talk to you about this. Please.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, but I agreed. The earliest that we could meet was Thursday after lunch. Harry agreed to drive to my office this time, since I had driven to see him previously. I let Grace know I had an appointment.
On Thursday Professor Johnson showed up at our offices around 1:00 PM. I had given him the directions, but I never really explained what the place was like. My intercom buzzed and Grace said, “Mister Buckman, your appointment is here.”