On Laying Something Out
Wherever Old Joe Grady goes along the Blue Ridge Mountains, people ask how he managed to do it. What they mean by it, though, isn't always clear. If a kid is asking the question, Old Joe can be fairly sure that he is getting another request for the bear flinging story. Others, it's hard to tell. Old Joe generates a lot of natural curiosity, it seems. People don't understand how he is able to find work wherever he is, pretty much whenever he needs it. They don't see how he is able to get into so many scrapes and not only emerge alive but with enhanced stature as well. I think when people ask Old Joe Grady how he did it, they are really asking how you go about becoming a living legend. They want to know Joe's secret. They are hoping that he will lay it out for them, so that they can do it too.
But laying it out isn't something Old Joe will do. Because whenever you lay something out, Joe says, that something is usually dead or durn near it. Take a frog. You lay the frog out on a board and pin it down so that you can see it better. But the frog is all wrapped up in trying to wiggle off that board. It hurts, by golly, being pinned to a board. But that's not your concern. You're looking for the plain truth about that frog, and the frog is twisting around like it was intentionally disrupting the search for knowledge. So you poke a knife into the frog's belly, and the frog learns how to stay real still for a long time. Now you can look for what makes that frog tick. You can slice through the skin and lift the little heart up with the tip of your knife. You can see the veins and arteries running back and forth through muscle and around bones.
If you look hard enough, you will almost surely fail to notice that the frog is no longer there. Because all you can ever lay out is a thing, and a frog is not a mere thing. Here's what Old Joe says a frog is. Late one evening, Grenvil Bailes was standing near his pond gazing into the drowsy distance. Suddenly, a bullfrog croaked, not two feet away. Scared Grenvil so bad he jumped into the water. Folks who saw it said when he jumped he even looked like a frog.
So if you want to know the secret about something, don't think you've got to start by taking it apart. That's what Old Joe Grady thinks. If you want to learn secrets, you've got to work your way into the center of something without messing it up. And that's quite a trick. Never will you find an important secret in something you have laid out.
Or in a list of steps. In Joe's opinion, practically everything worthwhile in life is been reduced to lists. How to make friends, how to be successful, how to make love, how to find salvation. There is no end to these lists. To most people, they are just a way of organizing and highlighting things to make them easy to remember. For Old Joe Grady, they are the obituaries of everything they describe. He claims the minute you place something in a list is the same minute you can be sure its magic is gone. Old Joe's mom used to keep a list of everything his dad kept at the general store. She called it inventory. His dad called it a pain in the ass. When Old Joe learned to read, add and subtract, she passed the job onto him. That began his lifelong hatred of lists. And his disinterest in ever running the store himself.
Old Joe doesn't get his back up often. When he does, you can be close to sure that somebody is trying to gouge out his secret to living, preferably laid out in a list of steps. Once with a particularly persistent reporter, Old Joe revealed that the first step of his secret was to walk away from tedious problems. Then, while the reporter was writing that down, Joe disappeared.