What Men Don’t Tell Women

Roy Blount Jr.

To Ennis,
before she goes off and leaves her old dad

Contents

INTRODUCTION

What Men Don’t Tell Women

WHERE’D YOU GET THAT HAT?

Blue Yodel 1

How to Visit the Sick

Blue Yodel 2

What Authors Do

Blue Yodel 3

The Lowdown on Southern Hospitality

Blue Yodel 4

On Hats

Blue Yodel 5

Women in the Locker Room!

Blue Yodel 6

He Took the Guilt out of the Blues

Blue Yodel 7

How to Get a Lot out of Opera

Blue Yodel 8

What to Do on New Year’s Eve — I

Blue Yodel 9

How to Sweat

Blue Yodel 10

HOW MEN TELL TIME

Blue Yodel 11

What to Do on New Year’s Eve — II

Blue Yodel 12

The Roosters Don’t Like It

Blue Yodel 13

Secrets of Rooting

Blue Yodel 14

Why Wayne Newton’s Is Bigger Than Yours

Blue Yodel 15

The Secret of Gatorgate

Blue Yodel 16

Still in Remedial Bayoneting

Blue Yodel 17

“I Always Plead Guilty”

Blue Yodel 18

Out of the Clauset

I DIDN’T DO IT

Blue Yodel 19

The List of the Mohicans

Blue Yodel 20

My Cat Book Won’t Come

Blue Yodel 21

Secrets of the Apple

Blue Yodel 22

How to Sportswrite Good

Blue Yodel 23

The Truth about History

Blue Yodel 24

Why Not Active People in Beer?

Blue Yodel 25

If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close

Blue Yodel 26

Why I Live Where I Live, If I Do

Blue Yodel 27

About the Author

Introduction

What Men Don’t Tell Women

Got me a pretty momma,

Got me a bulldog too.

Got me a pretty momma,

Got me a bulldog too.

My pretty momma don’t love me,

But my bulldog do.

—Jimmie Rodgers, “Blue Yodel No. 10”

I’m … No, I won’t tell you what I am.

—Henry Kissinger, interviewed by Oriana Fallaci

WOMEN probably think that what men do tell women is bad enough. What is to be gained by telling of such things as Flower Guilt, or Why on Earth Female Dogs Do That, or The Toilet-Seat Issue’s Unspoken Crux, or Why You Can’t Confess Fidelity. Secrets have reasons. And yet I feel impelled to lay these things before the public, which includes women. It is because of a vision I had at the Ladies’ Home Journal.

For me the Ladies’ Home Journal has always had a musky quality. It was a prime source of my earliest and most effluvial sex education. When I was a boy, nothing off-color came into our home except Moonbeam McSwine, whose languidly heaving surface, in “Li’l Abner,” was veiled by nothing but a tattered — or rather peeling — vestige of dirndl and splotches of mud, and who spent her time lolling with hogs. I now trace certain unhygienic dreams of my childish nights back to Moonbeam McSwine, and although Al Capp went sour toward the end of his days and always had a flawed ear for dialect (yo’ is short not for “you,” as Capp would have it, but for “yore,” as in “yo’ momma”), I am grateful to him.

But my mother subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal, and that was something else. Inside stuff. More than I felt was wise for me to know about, and yet I wanted to know. There were certain ads. (“Modess … Because.” Because what? What because what?) The “Tell Me, Doctor” column. And a regular feature called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” (Marriage can be lost? Marriage? As in marriage that involves parents for instance and, say, little kids for example and, for instance, me — can be in jeopardy?) The Ladies’ Home Journal evoked the way my parents’ bed smelled when I climbed in with them in the morning. The primal funk. The gene-pool frowst. It smelled appalling. But homey. It must be saved.

I am not talking about any kind of specific whiff or anything specific that might have been going on in there. What kind of person do you think I am? I’m talking about the whole grave cohabitational bouquet. Books ought to be full of conjugal sheets.

Ironically enough, I was all set to call this book Clean Sheets.¹ Then the Ladies’ Home Journal invited me to come up and discuss story ideas. I welcomed the notion of a writing project wholesome enough to console my late mother, who taught me to read the way lions teach their cubs to pounce, and who never got over the fact that I once wrote about orgasms for Cosmopolitan. (That what I wrote was a spoof does not seem to have registered very clearly either with Cosmopolitan — see my book One Fell Soup, available in stores — or with that Sunday-school classmate of my mother who felt obliged to show the article to her. What I don’t understand is, why was anybody in my mother’s Sunday-school class reading Cosmopolitan?)

But when I went to the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, I learned that it had become a hard-hitting magazine proud of taking on burning controversial topics. (As if there were ever a topic more burning than “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”) The editors I talked to — two women of evident dynamism — wanted to know what I thought of the New Woman.

I liked these editors fine and was all for coming to terms with them. But I didn’t know what to say about the New Woman. I still don’t. I am sitting here, now, trying to think of something to say about the New Woman, in all candor and even desperation, and I can’t. And I couldn’t then.

So the topic shifted, slightly, to my marriage. I must have blurted something about my marriage. Soon one of the editors was exclaiming, “‘Fifties Man Married to Sixties Woman!’ Write us something about that!” My blood ran cold. I said I didn’t want to.

“Why not?” they said. Well, I said, would they want to write about their marriages in a magazine? “We do it all the time!” they said.

We moved on. I let it slip that I had a seventeen-year-old daughter. “‘An Open Letter to My Daughter: Is Youth Wasted on the Young?’!” they exclaimed. I said I didn’t want to write an open letter to my daughter in a magazine. They seemed incredulous. I began to mope. Right there in a room with New Women.

“Okay, how about this,” one of the editors tried. “We had a writer who was going to do this, but he never did. How about ‘What Men Don’t Tell Women’!”

Annnnngangang. My head swam.

“Wh … why would I tell?” I asked weakly. Their incredulity mounted.

“I mean …,” I said, “like … Tell what?”

“For instance!” one of them said. “Physical Attractiveness Is Important!”

“Ahnh?” I replied.

“What men don’t tell women is that men do look for physical appearance in a woman!”

“W … Women don’t know that?” I asked.

Frankly, it has always seemed to me that women have at least as pronounced a sense of the importance of a woman’s appearance as men do — hence whole industries; but I was damned if I was going to say that.

“That Men Are Attracted to Pretty, Dumb Women!” they said.

“Well …,” I said, beginning to feel like an American critic of American foreign policy enfolded by foreign critics of American foreign policy. “… I don’t know that I’d put it that way. In fact, I’m beginning to see more and more women my age showing up somewhere with cute young towheaded guys with no stomachs who never heard of Edward G. Robinson.”

Actually I did not have in mind, very firmly, a single specific instance of this phenomenon; but I felt there was a case to be made along those lines and I had to say something. “And if being attracted to pretty, dumb members of the opposite sex is a peculiarly male trait,” I said, “then why do so many women love Elvis? Everybody is attracted, prima facie, to pretty members of the opposite sex, or of whatever sex they’re attracted to, and why not? And there’s something to be said for being attracted to people who can’t outsmart you.”

I was overstating my case. I wasn’t at all sure I had a case and I was overstating it. I have a tendency sometimes to start saying things I don’t necessarily actually think, because I don’t want people to leap too soon to conclude that I can’t possibly think what I think they think I can’t possibly think.

Fortunately, I didn’t say some of those things about attractiveness out loud. Much of what I uttered to the Ladies’ Home Journal’s editors, I would imagine, had the ring of well-intentioned but pained moaning sounds.

But pained moaning sounds have reasons. The more I thought about it, after leaving the Ladies’ Home Journal, the more I realized that I had been writing about What Men Don’t Tell Women all my life. In my head or out. If there is anything this book, for instance, is full of, it is things that men don’t tell women. Also things that sick people don’t tell the well, things that Southern hosts don’t tell Northern guests, things that authors don’t tell readers, things that hardly anyone will tell anyone about money, things that all too few people tell all too many people who wear hats, and so on. But especially things that men don’t tell women.

Men don’t tell women these things for various reasons.

But I am an American! I believe in freedom of information! And I have never entirely emerged from the intersexual spell cast on me by intimations I gleaned from the Ladies’ Home Journal in my newtlike early youth.

Need men and women forever be two separate peoples? Can’t there be a link? I decided to give this book the title I have given it. Then I decided to prize apart the book’s intricately interlocking pieces and insert certain scraps of testimony, from men of many stripes, revealing for the first time the things that men don’t tell. I have called these revelations blue yodels, in tribute to Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, who made an art of the pained moaning sound.

One thing I have found myself unable to reveal is what happened on a certain date that I had many years ago with a cheerleader (see “Secrets of Rooting,” page 82). I will say this: It would never have happened if I had been able to tell her something.

1. Or, My Mind Is All Made Up (But You Can Hop on In).

Where’d You Get That Hat?

BLUE YODEL 1

JOSEPH

I just came from this Men and Masculinity Workshop. Rose has completed assertiveness training and she said if she was going to continue relating to me in a broader sense I needed to go through tenderness training and claim my wholeness. She said, “Won’t it be nice? We’ll hang yours over the lowboy right next to mine.” She has her assertiveness certificate up there. This workshop gives you one in tenderness.

It met in the Pierce High gym. We sat cross-legged on the floor to break down our stereotype image of how men sit. And we related our feelings while empathizing.

We learned how men have lost their aliveness in relationships because we have been programmed from an early age to always be in control. Alec was our counselor in getting us to open up. Alec said we had always wanted to be tender, but the society told us we couldn’t be, but the rapidly growing men’s movement was changing that.

We have to acknowledge that we have always been programmed that men have to always be the strong ones. And instead of using women as a dumping ground for our feelings, we have to not be isolated from other men. Alec told us to put our arm around the next man.

I put my arm around this one man, Neil. He said he was working on getting over his aversion to listening to women talk on the phone. He was getting into nonobjective phone conversation, where you talked to hear the other person’s voice. Also talking long-distance without any sense of time. He said it relaxed him. He said his problem came from his father always yelling for everybody in the family to get off the phone for Christ’s sake. It took him a long time to realize that relaxing on the phone wasn’t sacrilegious. He said he heard there was a way you could apply for a grant to pay your phone bill.

This other man, Jerry, opened up to the group and said his father was not a feeling, emotional man. This other man with a name like Uli said his father wasn’t either.

There were these teenage kids coming into the gym bouncing a basketball.

Then Neil said he had something to say he’d never told anybody. He said he walked past his parents’ bedroom one morning on his way to breakfast and instead of being at the breakfast table already his father was lying there in the bed still, crying. His mother was burning bacon. Alec asked Neil how this made him feel. Neil said it was why he lost his erection every time he thought of bacon.

Alec said see, that was that whole male myth.

I wished I had my arm around Uli or Jerry instead. What I really wished was that Alec would hurry up and give us our certificates. I could feel Neil tensing up to tell something else. But then these teenage kids said they had the gym.

Alec said no, we had the gym for another half hour.

These kids said no, they had the gym now. Some of them were over messing with Alec’s papers and laughing. Alec went and got his papers.

One of the kids said to Alec, “Hey, what’s your problem, man?”

Alec said his problem was all men’s problem, grappling with changing roles. He asked the kids if they’d like to sit in on the rest of the session.

The kid with the ball was dribbling real hard right next to me and Neil where we were sitting cross-legged on the floor. And then Neil stood up and started telling about how we were trying to become whole people and the kid bounced the ball off Neil’s nose.

And then the kids started pounding on all of us while we were getting un-cross-legged and our arms untangled and Neil stole the ball and drove half the court and missed a lay-up. I thought that was pretty cool, if he’d hit it. And the kid Neil stole the ball from pulled out a knife and we left the gym.

We stood outside on the steps. Neil was bleeding. Alec pointed out to us that the kids were caught up in the whole male myth, and we had gotten something out of the experience. He suggested we take turns helping Neil stop bleeding.

So we did, and Neil said his father always accused him of not playing tough when he was hurt. He said one time he had a sprained ankle in the CYO basketball championship and his father made him tape it up and play. “I was eleven,” he said. “My father said, ‘Be a Marine.’” And Neil missed four lay-ups and his team lost. Neil said he missed lay-ups to prove something to his father.

Then I said, “Well, can we have our certificates?” They were all jumbled up and when Alec got them straight and handed them out, somebody had written FAGIT in big letters on mine.

How will I tell Rose?

How to Visit the Sick

BOUNDING into the room is wrong. Hospitalized people do not like to be bounded in upon. The first thing visitors should see as they step off the elevator is the following sign.

But there is no way to squeeze onto one sign all the things that hospital visitors should bear in mind. Some people assume that just by visiting someone who is sick, they are doing a heartwarming thing. That is like assuming that just because you are walking out onto a stage, you are doing an entertaining thing. A person in a hospital bed is often tempted to take advantage of his position (whose advantages are few enough) by cutting into visitors’ conversation sharply with: “If somebody doesn’t say something interesting pretty soon I’m going to hemorrhage.”

But he doesn’t want to deprive his visitors — call them the Bengtsons — of the chance to feel warmhearted. So he doesn’t complain.¹ He just lies there, biding his time until the day when he is up and around and the Bengtsons aren’t, and he can visit them in a hospital and spill their ice water on their pillows. And the Bengtsons, of course, will have to say, “Oh that’s all right! Don’t worry!”

One of the burdens of the hospitalized person is that he is, in a sense, the host, and must be gracious to the well. Even though the well often go too far in playing down the seriousness of the patient’s complaint: “What you’ve been through is nothing! My sister had both of hers taken out with no anesthetic.”

Or they play it up too much: “You poor thing. I could no more have borne up under this terrible thing the way you have than … Of course, I don’t think the full impact of it has hit you yet.”

Or they claim too much expertise with regard to the patient’s complaint: “Oh, no, no, that’s not right at all. What you’ve actually had removed is urethral stones. My aunt had the same thing and I did some research on it to fill her in. You see, your trouble is too many cola drinks. Probably been going on for years. So that a kind of fine brown sediment …”

Or they are too innocent: “Where exactly is the prostate, anyway?”

What are some guidelines to appropriate visitor behavior?

Be sensitive, but not to a fault. Say you are telling a story about frogs. It is better to go ahead and use the word “croak” than to stop at “croa —” and bolt from the room.

Bring gossip. Preferably gossip about people other than the patient. But do not preface such gossip with something like, “Be grateful you’re in here. If you were able to work you’d probably be getting fired like Morris Zumer.”

Bring anecdotes that make interns and nurses look foolish. Once, in an emergency ward, an intern was trying to deal with a patient who had delirium tremens. “It’s your imagination!” the intern insisted. The patient seized him by the necktie so ferociously that the intern could neither breathe nor break the patient’s grip. The intern cried out for a nurse, who arrived. “Get … scissors … cut … tie,” the intern gasped. The nurse briskly left the room, returned with scissors, pounced, and snipped off the intern’s tie — the loose end.

That is a story someone told me in a hospital once, and I enjoyed it. It may not be perfect for every patient. Some patients may prefer quieter stories. Others may have delirium tremens, in which case entertainment is the last thing they need. Every patient is different. But there are three rules that apply to visitors in every case:

Are you reading this in someone’s hospital room? Can it possibly have been left, on purpose, where you would find it? If by any chance you found it under the patient’s bed, please get out from under there.

And now please let the patient watch “Family Feud” in peace.

1. The careful reader will note that sometimes my pronouns imply that every person in the world is male, and sometimes that he isn’t. When I go out of my way to avoid saying something like, “The trouble with nuclear conflagration is that it will leave man with no sense of his sociometric place” (by saying, “The trouble with nuclear conflagration is that it will leave a person with no sense of his sociometric place, or hers either”), it is because I am suffering from Pronoun Guilt. The question of sexism in pronouns is one that deeply concerns me, since that is the kind of guy I am. I have invented new pronouns, none of which I will cite here because there is nothing quite so funny-looking as a new pronoun. I have devised hermaphroditic characters named Heshie and Sheehy, who have failed to find favor as pronoun replacements. Man has yet to deliver himself from Pronoun Guilt.

BLUE YODEL 2

KEN

I know this guy, says he has Flower Guilt.

“What?” I say.

He says, “Let’s face it: Men don’t like flowers.”

I say I like flowers.

“Okay,” he says. “You like flowers. But you don’t love flowers.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“But you aren’t moved by flowers,” he says.

“I really like planting zinnias,” I say.

“Ah!” he says. “Sure. Delving in the ground. Improving your property. But you don’t like getting flowers.”

“I guess I don’t. Because it would mean I was in the hospital.”

“Exactly,” he says. “But women like getting flowers.”

I say that’s true.

“Women love getting flowers. Women are moved when they get flowers. All women. Every woman. Sending flowers to a woman is like … heroin to them.”

“Well…,” I say.

“Okay. But you see my point. My point is, all a man has to do is call a florist — ‘Dozen roses, MasterCard number so-and-so, address such-and-such’ — and he has done something that a woman will perceive as sweet.”

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“To a woman, having flowers sent to her is thoughtful. To a man, sending flowers is a way of being thoughtful without putting any thought into it. It’s like foreign aid.”

I told him I wasn’t sure I saw the connection there.

“Okay, forget that,” he says. “My point is, when you can melt a woman by doing something that doesn’t involve any intrinsic emotion on your part, detachment sets in. Dissociation. Guilt. I send my wife flowers every couple of weeks. A computer could do it. It makes her happy. It makes her happy.” He has this pained look. “I’m glad she’s happy. But…”

“Okay,” I say. “So why don’t you send Shana”— that’s his wife — “why don’t you send Shana something thoughtful that does require thought?”

“Because that’s how I always get in trouble.”

What Authors Do

I AM not the kind of person who feels right about calling himself “a writer,” even. It sounds like something you would assert, falsely, in a singles bar. (A friend of mine once asked a young woman what she did. “I’m a novelist,” she said. “Really?” he replied. “Would I have heard of any of them?” “I haven’t finished it yet,” she said.) I’ll bet Jesse James, when asked what his line of work was, never said, “I’m a desperado.” He probably said, “Oh, something in trains.”

But job description does come up. I remember once I walked through a door while poking around in a journalistic capacity backstage at a country music show. Actually my mind was not on the poking so much as on turning a sentence, then in an early development phase, that I thought frankly might buff up pretty nice. “Are you an artist?” someone asked. “Well …,” I said in all modesty. Then I saw what he was driving at. I had walked through the wrong door.

Years passed. Then, the other morning at a pancake breakfast, someone — a member of the general public — gave me a funny look and asked, out of the blue, “Are you an author?”

The world shifted for me at that moment.

Hitherto, I had thought of being an author as an occasional thing, like being the groom. I was not working this pancake breakfast, I was just there to eat. Was I going to have to start living … an author’s life?

I don’t think writers ever say “author.” Publishers do, but that is just one more reason why the old question so often arises: What exactly, other than absentmindedness, can the publishing industry and writers ever have imagined they had in common?

What is the difference between an author and a writer? A writer, as we know, writes; an author has written. What does an author do? Auth? Authorize? An author authors. But never in the present tense. No one says, when asked what he or she is doing, “I’m authoring.” The Oxford English Dictionary cites, from Chapman’s Iliad, “The last foul thing Thou ever author’dst.” The OED does not explain how “author’dst” is pronounced, but I imagine the full quotation is either

Thou mak’st appearances, through the mist

Of the last foul thing Thou ever author’dst

or

Thou goest on Carson; we bog down amidst

The last foul thing Thou ever author’dst.

Writer derives from various ancient verbs meaning “to tear, to cut, to scratch, to wear by rubbing.” Before English got write, wrote and written right, it tried wryte, vryte, vryet, wryt, wrighte, wreitte, wreat, wrait, wraet, vreet, wrijte, wroite, wreyte, whryte, wrythe, wreyt, wrytte, vryt, vriht, wrygth, wryght, writte, vrit, wret, wrette, wrete, wreit, ureit, wireete, vrait, wrat, whrat, vrat, wart, wratte, wraite, wrayt, wraat, wrot, wrotte, wroate, wroght, wroot, wroott, wrout, wryton, writun, wrytyn, wreotan, wreoton, wreten, ywriten, ywriton, ywritein, ywryten, ywrytyn, uuriten, vrityn, wyrtyn, vyrtyn, whryttyn, vrutten, vreittin, reaten, wraitten and many others.

Author comes from the Latin “to promote, increase.” Authors, as we know, sell more books than writers do.

But authors crop up not only on promotional tours. An author also gives talks to young people about how to become an author. Youth looks upon him more or less expectantly, and if he were candid he would refer to his own school days and say, “All I ever wanted was for people not to look at me like I was a dip.” But that wouldn’t be authorial, and also he is afraid that “dip” may mean something completely different today. He advises plenty of writing, and reading.

An author reads. Not to himself, quietly; he has no time for that. To others, aloud. As it happens, literature is that which is lost aloud. The whole point of writing is to get something down in a voice that is better than the writer’s own. When the writer tries to render this better voice in his own, the harmony isn’t close. Sometimes too he may look up from such better-self abuse and make eye contact with someone in the audience. In its place, such contact may be all well and good. In literature … Say you are perusing away through The Portrait of a Lady. How would you like to turn a page and see, not the lady’s, but Henry James’s eye? In all its helpless ferocity. And do you think James would be at ease with yours?

An author also takes part in symposia. A symposium, even if all the panelists hate each other outright, is a more companionable affair than writing. However, a symposium poses a problem that the writer has devoted his life to avoiding: thinking of something worth saying while saying it.

A writer is loath to repeat himself. An author is bound to. Sometimes four times on different talk shows in one twelve-hour period in Philadelphia. An author is bound even to quote himself. With or without attribution. “It was I, I believe, who wrote …” It goes against the grain. (Of a writer.)

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

An author is a person who, if he or she is not a hermit, goes down to Memphis and is informed quite unlasciviously by a Friend of the Library, “You are my author for the afternoon.”

An author is a person who is informed that he is to give a talk at a “Book and Author Dinner” and then a few days later is advised not to count on it, unless certain other authors cancel out, because the event’s sponsors have realized that they invited too many Southern (or whatever the author’s genus is) authors.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.

Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books — I don’t care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible — that are on the shelves. And then … Say you are Ewell Loblate, author of Don’t Try This at Home.

You go to the counter and ask, “Do you have that book, uh, Don’t, uh, Try This … at Home?” The clerk, who is listening to Black Sabbath through an earplug, looks blank.

“What’s it on?” he says, after waiting to see whether you will leave.

“Oh, well, sort of … autobiogra … not strictly, but…”

By now there is no doubt in the clerk’s mind that even if you won’t leave, you should.

“Who’s the author?” he inquires.

“Uh, I believe … something like …” Oh, the horror! “Lollib … Libl … uh, Loblate?”

The clerk makes an indifferent noise. “I’ll call downstairs.”

“Oh, you needn’t …” But the machinery is in motion. After a long, long wait, as the clerk moves with understated sinuousness to some hellish cranial thrum and sells eleven copies of a book, on which high hopes are pinned, about weight loss through cats, here comes the conveyor belt, loudly, bearing a (the) copy of your book, blinking in the light.

Now, you don’t want to buy your book. On an author’s earnings, you can’t afford it. On the other hand, you don’t want to thumb through your book under the gaze of this person, this link to the reading public, and then say no, no thanks, you don’t believe it is exactly what you had in mind.

But what you want most of all not to do is let the clerk catch sight of your picture on the jacket.

Which he does. “Hey!” he shouts, at last interested. “This looks like you!” More loudly. “This you?”

“Well … no. That is, I …”

“Hey, this is you! Hey! Here’s an author! Asking for his own book! Hey, wouldn’t they give you any? HEY!”

And all the shoppers in the store gather round and are joined from the street by several people who have never been in a bookstore before, and they all marvel and hoot and cry “Author!” and poke each other (“Says it’s autobiographical!” cries the clerk), roll their eyes, press in to check the picture against your face for themselves, howl, then scatter, shaking their heads in disbelief. This happens to some authors several times a day.

Still, to author is to promote, to increase. To grow. One develops a knack. I myself believe, in fact, that although I have had many years more experience at writing than at being an author, I am better at the latter. I think I would be quite good, for instance, at receiving prestigious awards. Any awards.

It may be that in time, taking one thing with the other, an author becomes inured. Develops a sense of himself as one of those bearded faces in Authors, the card game he played as a child. Pens one of those big two-page ads for the International Paper Company proving that today the printed word is more vital than ever.