The Ax

38

Driving toward the recycling center, I find myself thinking about the concept of the learning curve, and how far along it I've come. And how very lucky I was that first time out, with the original HCE. What was his name? I'm having trouble remembering it.

Herbert Everly, that was it.

How simple that one was, simple and smooth and fast and clean. It encouraged me, it made everything else possible, because it made me believe the whole thing could be that impeccable. If I'd had the second HCE to do first, none of this would ever have happened. I just wouldn't have been up to it.

The idea of the learning curve is, the first time you do something you aren't very good at it, but you learn something about how the job is done. Then the second time, you're better, but still flawed, and you learn a little more. And so on, until you're perfect. The learning curve is an arc, beginning with a steep upward sweep, because you're learning a lot each time in the early days, and then gradually it flattens out to a level, as you learn in smaller and smaller increments the nearer you get to the ideal.

Well, I'm not perfect at this yet, God knows, I haven't attained the ideal, but I've come a long way up that learning curve since Herbert Everly. Of course, the irony in this one is, as the arc of my learning curve flattens toward complete competence, I'll have mastered a skill I'll never use again.

I certainly hope I'll never have to use it again. But it is, I admit, a useful skill to possess.

Earlier today, I took Marjorie to her Saturday job at the New Variety, and when I backed the Voyager out of the garage even I couldn't readily see anything different in there. The dark bulky bags leaned together well in the back, away from daylight, amid birdseed bags and paint cans and winter boots and all the rest of the stuff garages breed when no one is looking.

On the way to the movie house, I told Marjorie the story I'd made up in bed last night, before falling asleep, about the friend's moneymaking scheme that had caused me to go out for several hours after dinner. The story I told her was that my friend reminded me that the United States government shreds its old paper money to destroy it, and it was his idea to talk the government into letting us make fresh paper out of the shredded pulp. We would make paper bags, colored green, with dollar signs on them, and market them under the name Money Bags; they would be both useful and a great novelty item.

I told Marjorie I'd thought it was a clever idea — she seemed less sure — but that I'd asked my friend what were we supposed to do with it? We're both knowledgeable about turning pulp into paper, but that's all. His scheme needed a politician, to talk the government into letting us have the paper, and a marketer, to get the Money Bags out there. "I told him," I explained to Marjorie, "if he could find a couple of people like that, and they were serious about it, I'd be happy to join in."

"Not in a million years," she said, and I had to agree.

When I came back home, after dropping Marjorie at the movie house, both Betsy and Billy were out, she at a rehearsal of a play she's doing at college — Arsenic and Old Lace; she's one of the aunts, in much makeup — and he off at a friend's house, engrossed in the friend's new computer software (he'll make do that way until life improves around here).

I opened the garage door, drove the Voyager in, shut the garage door, moved the rear seat of the car out of the way, and loaded the two plastic bags. And now I'm on my way to the recycling center.

The recycling center, of course, is what used to be called the dump, and part of it still is that. There's private trash collection in our neighborhood, but it's considerably cheaper to sort the trash yourself and bring it to the recycling center. Glass and tin and paper and cardboard they take for free, and garbage they take for fifty cents per large plastic bag. The bags are tossed into a chute, and from there they go into a compacting garbage truck, and from there they're taken to a landfill operation down on Long Island Sound.

A sea voyage for Hauck Exman. He's a Marine, he'll like that.