awesome debate team of Richards and Bischoff from Ogden High) at Mr. Wests desk, scrunched over a piece of paper, talking and gesturing. Later, I saw them on the eastern steps of the Moench building. I had gone there to smell the grass. The same piece of paper was in Maurices hand. I heard the same rising voices, saw the same waving hands and arms. A couple of days later, they were in the College Inn having a Coke together, a piece of paper, crumpled and spotted, between them on the counter. They scratched out words, put words in. Scansion marks slashed and dipped above the lines; their mouths emitted humms and grrs. They were attending, as they had attended and would attend again. In the fall Scribulus, under Maurices name, appeared: Mourn not my death in days close after; Follow not my death with furrowed face, Trade not sorrow for joyous laughter with four more lines in the same infectious strain. Maurice had not been born under the ah bright wings of the muse. Few are. But I had seen for the first time a wrestling match between writers and language. Poetry, then, was not something to quote glibly or to write down as the words dribbled viscously from ones lips. Here was a serious matter, the more serious because in the struggle between talent and language, the talent could never win. Maurices poem had one practical result: under its influence I wrote the one line of verse I have ever attempted: Snuff not the flame while yet the wax is warm, a secretion of dutiful iambics in which, after forty-five years of scrutiny, I am unable to find a mite either of sense or beauty. Later in the year, Maurice published a longer poem full of thys and wroughts and a burden of Satanic thought not typical of Mr. Mon-sons debaters. That was another thing I was learning to like about poetry, as opposed to debate, which I was losing interest in: in poetry, if you arent careful, you will say what you mean. But good prose is even more dangerous than poetry in that respect. In time Maurice was remanded by his muse to his proper sphere of editing, lawyering, and politicking. But he and Mr. West, exerting themselves over an inky squiggle on paper, showed me what I had never before suspected: that in this world, right here in Ogden, were people who thought words and sentences worth arguing about, that the language we use should be used as if it were holy writ, that to use language is both to make a world and to express it, that what is not formulated verbally does not exist. It was not Mr. Wests or Maurices fault that the poems werent very much though Ive remembered some of the lines. Watching them being hammered out was the lesson. I learned it in the early hours of my Weber sleep. I went into literature the way Thoreau went into the woods, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not want to live what was not life, living is so dear. And though I have never denied the reality nor my love for the reality of Plain City a reality of Sunday school, priesthood meetings, mutual, baseball (how could I deny baseball, I who was headed for the Tigers outfield?), and the never-ending work in the onion, po-tato, sugar beet, hay, and grain fields, the reality of duty and constraint I knew that my daydreams or my waking dreams of another reality were real, too. I went into literature to search for and to serve the reality that has to be imagined into being, not to make a career, not to administer a program, not to meet deadlines, not to make a reputation. I went into literature to understand it as best I could and to write some if I were able because I did not want to die the shrivelled, puny lives that I saw people dying on all sides of me even while they lived dying at the height of their powers and in the ripeness of their years, with all their honors on. I would live as best I could. I would dream reality. Then I would die. I did not know all that for sure until just now. But it was nudged vigorously onward a long time ago by the ironic affection of Thatcher Allred. Thatcher It is not possible to catch Thatcher in my torn sieve. Perhaps I was too much in awe of him. Tall people (above five-seven) awe me. Scott Cartwright, an ROTC cadet colonel at Ogden High and my Phoenix brother, awed me. John Piers awed me, although he didnt know I existed. Tall people miss a lot. Orlo Child, Phoenix advisor and geology teacher awed me. I once spent four years as a department chairman screeching invectives into the belt buckle of a college president who spent the four years looking around to see where the noise was coming from. Then he went to work for the Agha Khan. Carlyle Green awed me, as much for his stoical way with his bass fiddle his band played for many of the school dances as for his height, which, though excessive, was decent. His body forming an obtuse angle behind his slanting bass, his fingers jiggling up and clown on the finger board, the other hand slapping the strings, his slightly adenoidal mouth parted in a kind of lapidary pleasure, Carlyle is fixed in my memory as Mr. Rogers without a sweater jiving up his neighborhood. I know its an anachronism, but thats how I see him. In those days, nearly everyone awed me; but tall people awed me more than others. President Dixon kept telling me I was a leader of the students. No leader was ever so in awe of the people he was supposed to lead. But I wasnt a leader. I was only class president, then student body president. JMH Heslop, by virtue of ancient loyalty, mistook my holding these offices as signs of leadership. Urging me to greatness, he gave me a book called The Art of Leadership by Ordway Tead. I read it. I finished it wondering who would so mismanage their life as to spend it being a leader, where, apparently, one needed vision. Teal said you needed vision. Dr. Dixon was always saying it, in print, in assemblies, in conversations on the sidewalk between his home and the gym, eating trout at West Yellowstone this after the war during the facultys Health Curriculum Conferences. After a Friday night football game, we would drive to West for two days of large thinking about fish. Where there is no vision, he would say, the people perish. I know now that at least half the time he was saying fishin but I heard vision. Thats what Presidents were paid enormous sums to go out and get. Big ones, as I understood the matter, you received, if you were worthy. When I