Verbal People

Now there is a term, "mentor," which means someone who is usually older than you who knows stuff you do not know, and guides you to discover new knowledge, without necessarily spoon feeding or "teaching" you anything.

Aaron Sorkin, Verbal Person

So, I had a mentor, who I'll call Andrew, during the last phase of my training, who for some reason liked me, although he thought of me as a "verbal" person, which was, in his world, not at all a complement. Now, this was a man who loved Shakespeare and would drive us 90 minutes down to Stratford, Connecticut for their Shakespeare festival, and who was verbal enough to learn Spanish at the age of 32, so he could give a lecture about a new hormone he had identified to an audience in Spain.

Christopher Hitchens, Verbal Person

But, it was very apparent what he meant, when we'd be talking about a colleague in our Endocrinology department, a department devoted to laboratory work, hard science, numbers, graphs, studies, biochemistry, test tubes and lab rats, and he would say of someone who had not published work which seemed sufficiency trenchant, but who, nevertheless seemed to be moving up in the career track, toward tenure, and Andrew would say of him, with a conspiratorial smile, "Well, he's okay. He's verbal, though, you know?" 

Which was to imply there is something somehow shady, phony, not quite honest about a person whose success derives not from his graphs and papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, but through conversations, verbal agility and expressiveness.

Something about being "verbal" in Andrew's world was suspicious, not quite honest.

I liked Andrew, but I could not agree at all about this.

People with a facility for language, whether they were only good in one language, or good at learning languages seemed to me to be often the most interesting people.

Andrew valued engineers, and I could definitely appreciate the creativity and perceptual agility which made engineers so wonderful, but verbal people had their moments.

My college roommate, Nick, was one of those people who seemed to be able to acquire a new language on the way in from the airport by chatting with the taxi driver. He spoke French, Italian, Spanish, and those were just the languages I knew about, but he seemed to chat in just about anything, Swahili, for all I knew,  and he spent all his waking hours in the "reading room" lounge of the Rockefeller library, and I don't know how he ever graduated because I cannot recall ever seeing him type a paper or spend any time studying. 

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr, Verbal Person

The reading room lounge was made for Nick. I've little doubt it was the reason he chose our college. On his college tour, he must have seen the students gathered on the couches and plush chairs, in the large "lounge" room which was separated from the actual reading room.

The actual reading room was where students sat at long wooden library desks reading assigned material which various professors had put on hold, and that's where you signed out the book and read it and returned it so other classmates could come in and read it. This, obviously, was before computers and the internet--the mid 1960's--and when I tell my kids or grandkids about this, they always say, "You had only one book? And everyone had to share it?" And, when they say that, I realize I really did grow up in the stone age.

Verbal Person

But back to Nick. He sat there on the lounge side of the glass wall, on his couch. The glass wall was sufficient to completely insulate the reading room, where the real business of completing assignments from professors took place, from the noise of the lounge, which could only leak through when someone passed through the glass door in the glass wall. The lounge was a very lively pub scene without the alcohol. There were bathrooms at the back wall of the lounge, so any coed who had to use the bathroom, had to leave the reading room and make it past Nick and his merry band of talkers to get to the bathroom. 

Every evening after dinner until 9 or 10 pm, Nick held court, chatting up the various co-eds who loved to be part of his own version of Dorothy Parker's Algonquin round table, and they talked and talked. 

They talked in French about Camus who, Nick asserted, could not hold a candle to Sartre, when it came to philosophy, although he did have an attractive writing style. Or he'd launch into one of his tours of local Rhode Island accents, and when he did Cranston and then Woonsocket and then the haughty aristocrats of Newport, you could really hear the difference as you never could before. He was a latter day Henry Higgins, who could identify your place of birth by listening to you speak, and Nick could do that, if that place of birth was anywhere from Presque Isle, Maine to Darien, Connecticut. 

I was born in Washington, D.C. and Nick would dismiss that as "vanilla America dialect." He felt sorry for me, as I was speaking a language you could have got by listening to the evening news on TV.

Does Not Need to Be Verbal

And now, living in New Hampshire, I strain to catch distinguishing inflections in accents, but I cannot. People here could have grown up in Bethesda, Maryland for all I can tell from listening to them.

But their styles of speech, their individual cadences and fluency are as different as fingerprints.

My best friend, locally--I'll call her Maureen--is like listening to, or more accurately, becoming swept into a Robert Altman movie. You know, "Nashville," where there are several conversations going on at once in every scene, and so many digressions, you wonder if there is actually a story line developing, but there is, of course-- you just have to allow it to all coalesce and congeal, and meanwhile you are treated to such a wealth of color and detail you feel as if, just by watching and listening, you have developed an entire new world of friends. 

Maureen introduces you to cousins, uncles, friends of cousins, parents of children her kids went to school with, friends who got divorced who are still sparing with their ex'es, local officials, local lunatics who stand on street corners shouting into bullhorns, demented neighbors, neighbors who shoot rifles in their backyards for no apparent reason, not to mention the hawks who congregate for hawk meetings on her back porch, hummingbirds, the stray coyote, raccoons, turkeys who rise like Lancaster bombing groups and head right for her upstairs bedroom window, only to lift just enough to clear  the roof and head off to wherever turkeys head off to in November, not too far, as Maureen's cousin, Siobhan, has seen them on her walks in the Exeter woods, so you know they stay in town or nearby in the winter.

So, that's Maureen. Mesmerizing, immersive, fascinating and very, very verbal. Not an engineer.

Then there's another verbal person, who, like me, and unlike Maureen, is a fairly recent transplant to Hampton, New Hampshire, which is to say, she did not get born here or arrive in time to have gone to the Academy or Winnacunnet High School, but she's pushing 20 years in town. We'll call her Rachel. 

Whereas with Maureen, you would know it's Maureen simply by reading a transcript, for Rachel, you'd need face time, because with Rachel, half the conversation takes place in her face, mostly around her lips, before she says anything.  With Rachel, there's always a pause before she allows any declarative sentence to unfold, and you can see the beginnings of a little smile working at the edges of her lips as she edits, suppresses, processes and then delivers.

I heard about a Rachel  conversation and I did not have to be there to see her face as she delivered; I know exactly what it looked like. 

She is in court, suing her neighbor who has released his goats and pigs and sheep in a backyard expanse of land shared by about ten neighbors, which is locally referred to as the sheep meadow. The meadow is actually owned by a ninety year old man who no longer lives in his house with its backyard the sheep meadow, but is now in a nursing home on the dementia ward. The neighbor with the goats and pigs and sheep has exploited the absence of the owner of the sheep meadow by allowing his animals to maraud through the meadow and through all the backyards which blend into the meadow, and the goats in particular have demolished and eaten thousands of dollars of landscaping, shrubs, trees, flower beds.

So, Rachel is on the stand, and the defendant's lawyer asks why she hasn't sued the man who owns the sheep meadow. Why has she picked on the goat owner? whose only offense has been to allow his goats into the meadow, which is okay with the owner of the meadow, as far as anyone knows.

And here I can see the corners of Rachel's mouth flickering, as she tries mightily to not break into a beam to beam grin, as she struggles to say, keeping her voice register low, like Kathleen Turner's Jessica Rabbit, and says, "Let me understand your question here. You are asking me why I'm not suing a ninety year old demented man?"

The judge swings in his chair, and according to the transcript admonishes Rachel, "That's not how we do things here. You answer the question asked. You do not get to editorialize about the question."

He did not have to add, "You're a lawyer. You ought to know better."

Everybody knows Erica is a lawyer. She grew up in Maine and went to college there and then she applied to law schools where the winters would not require her to follow a snow plow to class. She got into Duke, but Vanderbilt offered her more money, so she went to Nashville and lived in a part of town which met her budget, but she felt she needed to buy a gun to stand a reasonable chance of survival in that neighborhood, and coming from Maine, owning a gun did not seem like a bad thing. But if she ever had to use it, you know she'd be suppressing that smile at the corners of her mouth.

Rachel replies to the judge, "Thank you, your honor. I understand your point entirely."

But of course, everyone in the courtroom has understood Rachel's point entirely.

Verbal people.

Gotta love 'em.

David Sedaris