Stan Ridgley

By Stan Ridgley 

             Quite often now – surely far more frequently than in early years when I dwelled in wiseass territory – I count my blessings.

            What blessings might those be?

            Immersion in a sparkling diversity every working day.  Tickled by the delights of a thousand different worldly combinations of cultures and milieus, served to me daily. 

           Others have it worse. 

           I sat passive in a car recently, precious minutes spent precisely as I chose to.  Slumped in the driver’s side, idly tapping the pearlized paint on the car door. Waiting in a parking lot.  A sunny day, shiny heat, but not unpleasant.  Nothing to recommend it either, save that the sun’s position along the horizon that day was marginally farther along than the day before . . . but not as far as ’twould be the next.

            A brief wait.  For a beautiful woman.  That self-same sun glinting off her blonde hair, the breeze catching her locks.

             Brief, indeed, but a wait long enough to peer at and ponder a law office up on the second floor of a ruddy brick building.  And I did ponder for a moment or two the fate of the person or persons in that office.  A lawyer “practicing” law.

             Locked into a life of repetition and ritual.

            Money, yes.

            Satisfaction?

            Perhaps.  Who knows? 

           But a day like every other.  Formulaic.  Familiar scenarios changing only in their mundane particulars.  Cramped.  The same people.  Cutouts.  Problems.  Role-playing.  Deadening.

           Maddeningly the same.

           A dulling, yet compelling psychological stimulus to act strangely.  Yearning to burst out, to shatter the golden shackles, to act . . . ignobly.

           But . . .

            A turn of the key, the engine rumbles low and smooth, and the formulas vanish, replaced with an insistent wind in the hair and a feeling of gratitude . . . even relief.  There but for the grace of God . . . 

            I toil in the second-largest metropolis on the east coast . . . a city of seven million, the home of Rocky and of Liberty.

            In the office next to mine is a fabulous marketing professor by the name of Masaaki.  Japanese, quite obviously.  In the offices on the other side are Arvind and Ram, colleagues of Indian descent, brilliant in their fields.

             I step out of my office to grab a bite at one of the many kiosks lining the main campus thoroughfare.  Walking out of the building, I hear strange-sounding, lyrical African tongues, Italian, Polish.  Students all.  Music pulsing on a spring day, echoing off the buildings, the contrapuntal rhythms of youth.  Do I fetch fruit from the Vietnamese kiosk . . . or a sandwich from the one run by Jon the Serb?  Or veggies from the Turks?

             There is always at least one Mohammed in each of my classes.

              This semester, I have two in one class.  One from Jordan, the other from Bangladesh.  Increasing numbers of students from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Bulgaria.  Two from Albania.  The Chinese, Japanese, and Indian cohorts are always large.  Closely followed by the Vietnamese and Thais.

               Jin is an interesting young man . . . Chinese, but grew up in South Africa and is a citizen of that country.  Speaks perfect English and has fantastic potential for a sharply defined personal comparative advantage.

               Ali is from Sudan.

               Muhammed from Mali.

               Asmaa from Morocco.

               And a smattering of Americans.

               This is diversity.

            This is true diversity of the kind the purveyors of the new appropriateness did not have in mind when the word became politically charged.  In fact, my university has been rated the nation’s Most Diverse Campus by the Princeton Review.  Only in such a place can someone fluently bilingual yet feel inadequate among the multilingual and talented.

            I testify to that diversity.  And to that talent.

            What does it mean for purposes of this space?

            Just this.

            The percussive effect on the soul of such a rich mix of cultures and peoples, all bright and inquisitive, all ambitious and energized, all intense and poised to hurl themselves onto a world that has no clue of what’s in store . . . well, how to measure it?  How to describe the pressure, the charge, the unharnessed and unruly dynamism?  How to measure it as compared to what would have been had a different environment prevailed in the similar time period.

            And, of course, there is the issue that every person forms a distinct portion of every other person’s environment.  So when we talk about a diverse environment’s impact on students, we are essentially talking of the students’ endless interactive impacts on each other individually and on themselves in the aggregate.

           What does it mean to learn in such an environment as opposed to one where, say, a brown face makes only an occasional appearance and a foreign accent is an aberration?  Or in an environment where there is homogeneity of one type or another, where white faces, yellow faces, brown faces . . . where beautiful lilting accents are a rarity? 

           To meticulously mix metaphors, this yeasty, electrical atmosphere is apparent to me, but strangely not to many of the students themselves.  This congeries of cultures is just the way it is.  It is not viewed overtly as an advantage or disadvantage, I think, but just a reality.

            For me – and for anyone who seeks engagement with life – it is a nirvana of sights, smells, exotic delights, and meshing of intrigues.  It is a seething, almost alive feeling of anticipation.  You cannot underestimate the potential intellectual energies of 34,000 college students massed in one place, dedicated (presumably) to learning, and unbearably optimistic about what they will do with themselves in the coming days, months, years.

            Such an atmosphere is enlivening to the inquisitive mind.  It is the antithesis to ritual and routine, formula and fatuousness.  It is the wellspring of creativity, the beating heart of innovation.

            The problem, for young people, is to reckon up their luck.  Their incredible luck at all of this. 

            I’ve reckoned up my own, and my cup runneth over. 

           A hundred story ideas beam out at me every workday.  I see a hundred stories in the faces of students, gathered together by a self-selection process that yields a sublime combination of careful selection by major, age, and interest . . . but random according to who actually shows up in the group I face each day.  I gain inspiration from the lifeforce of a hundred, and yet additional hundreds.

            Another day begins in several hours.

            I’ll drive into Philadelphia, but I’ll not complain at the cost of the gas. 

           I’ll celebrate life’s bargain that conveys me, personally, across an urban expanse to enjoy the delights the world has to offer, concentrated within the confines and shelter of a great university. 

           And when I get a moment to catch my breath . . . I’ll chronicle one of those stories.

                For me, one of the finest moments of writing comes when crashing through the wall.

                Or cracking open a Faberge egg to find what’s inside is far more valuable than what is glittery and sweet on the outside.

                Or . . . after a long spell of grappling with nothingness, of putting down laborious word after laborious phrase . . . finally bursting into the open with passage after passage of stuff that we think is grand and sweeping and mind-changing.  Like a dam breaking, if only for a spell.  Like the allies breaking out of hedgerow country.

                Okay, no one is breaking Faberge eggs . . . just notional eggs.  The point being, of course, that writer’s block is not real.  It is a conscious decision not to write what we think is good stuff.  I love that feeling of hitting that gusher, that well of black gold that bubbles up and froths, when you can’t get the words down fast enough.   But . . .

                . . .there are those other times, far more frequent times.  Those times when pulling the words out is excruciating.  But to carry one of these horrid little metaphors forward, if I do not hit a gusher, then I certainly do not a hit dry well.  There’s always something down there.

                Try this.

                Type a quote.  It doesn’t have to be an enduring quote, a quotable quote.  Something you heard on the street.

                “It was so loud, it made my ears itch.”

                “All those people up in New York on the streets . . . like maggots.  I couldn’t stand it.”

                And go from there.

                One of my favorite quotes is this one that follows.  I use it in speeches and I cite the author often, although he is not its originator.

                “Conan, what is best in life?”

                “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.”

                I love that snippet of dialogue.  Now I know that it wasn’t the author Robert E. Howard who came up with it, nor was it Oliver Stone and John Milius, two outstanding screenwriters.   It was Ghengis Khan  . . . or according to some unknown chronicler, it was.

                But what description, attitude, power.

                And what a vehicle for launching into a speech, providing a metaphor for . . . well, for most anything.  It’s an attention-grabber, and it serves to introduce people to Robert E. Howard.  I can vouch that people sit up for it, whether the topic is human resource management or stamp-collecting.

                Of all the quotes I might have reached for, that one always circles back around to me for some reason.  Its barbarism, tinged with fantasy, has tickled my fancy for more than two decades since big Arnold played the Sumerian.  His best role, in my opinion.  He was born to it.

                Now, I admit that the quote itself does not give rise to anything in the mind, perhaps, other than a visceral negative reaction, a sneered quip: “anti-intellectualism of the worst sort.”  For me, it gains what power it might have from the mental remembrance of that evening long ago when I finally saw the barbarian sitting stolid and cross-legged – simple in his thinking, eager for bloodlust, a killing machine, and a showman for the masses.

                The smell of sour sweat, well-worn leather from animals unmentionable, a gourd filled with viscous foul-smelling liquid, obscene “trophies” from conquered opponents, feathers and bones and rotting flesh.  Shiny oiled bodies.  Steel glinting in firelight.

                Tales of conquest.

                Words to quicken the blood of even the most staid of human resource managers.

                Perhaps not the most uplifting of words and phrases, but words to lead the mind and fire the imagination.  Words leading to better words . . . and still better words.   And so I type a quote, and I think of that quote, and I ponder the source and the circumstance.  And I let the words flow.  And soon, the dam breaks, and I have something of worth if not worthy.

                Hmm, perhaps not today.   But usually.

                Try it, and let me know how it works for you.  Here’s one:

                “And in the morning, I’ll be sober.”