I’ve always been clever. Never at the top of my class in school, I none-the-less, usually managed to find a place in the “A” room. Less clever lads were relegated to the “B” room. Okay, I was a “B” roomer in eighth grade, but I’m convinced it was because the principal didn’t like me. I suspect it was because my older brother, whom he liked a lot, convinced him I was a screwup. I doubt if it was because of the iodine, potato, and paper towel incident in the boys’ toilet (I’d rather not talk about it).
In any case, clever carried the day more often than not. In high school, where most of my teachers liked me, and the principal didn’t like anybody, I maintained a B+ average. It wasn’t due to a great work ethic or long hours of studying; and in fact, I seldom carried my books home from school. Of course that meant that I was available to carry the books of my less clever but more diligent and very cute neighbor, Betty Densmore (but that’s another story). I was able to get good grades because, even without a lot of effort, I would quickly get the idea. I did well on exams because, given enough time, I could usually figure out the correct answers. It didn’t hurt that multiple-choice exams were very popular in my school, and I had a system (it’s a carefully guarded secret system, but for a small fee…).
In college (more accurately colleges) I got by, almost exclusively on cleverness. I seldom studied, often didn’t even attend classes, and spent way too much time partying. I quickly discovered that college girls were way different from high school girls, or maybe I was just way different, being away from home for the first time. But in any case, at the end of my third semester, I was failing four out of five classes. Very cleverly, I dropped four out of five classes the day before final exams (you could do that back then) and maintained my B+ average for the year. The following year I cleverly got married, and my clever new wife (alas, not Betty Densmore) put an end to the partying.
After getting my degree in architecture, a field requiring a lot of cleverness, I got jobs with and got laid off from several different firms. Thereafter, I cleverly started my own firm, which met with some success. I like to think the success was due, in part, to my ability to solve vexing problems, plentiful when designing and building homes for fickle clients, with clever solutions. Later I branched out from architecture and construction to real estate. I considered it a very clever move to form a partnership with eight successful real estate professionals. I later wondered how clever it really was to form a partnership with eight successful real estate professional women. The partnership lasted several years, perhaps due less to clever and more to clever’s first cousin, cunning.
Retired now from architecture, construction, and real estate, well perhaps not so much retired as re-purposed, my new practice (with the emphasis on practice) is marketing and graphic design. In a field where cleverness is always needed, but seldom requested, and only occasionally rewarded, my cleverness is, likewise, only occasionally rewarded. On one such occasion, a clever design for a bottled water label won second place in an international competition. On other occasions, clever designs for coffee labels have won local competitions. If, these days, those occasions seem fewer and farther between, I remain optimistic.
After all, during my life I was clever enough not to marry Betty Densmore, and clever enough to not lose my children when my first wife, Jill, left me, for a woman. I was clever enough to have good health insurance, but wasn’t, sadly, clever enough to prevent my second wife, Linda, from dying of cancer. And if not clever enough to see the potential disaster of partnering with eight ambitious women in a real estate company, I was clever enough to see the potential of one of them, Nancy, to be my third wife, my soul mate and the true love of my life.
12/20/10
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