As a kid I lived with my single Mom in Bellingham, Washington. It was during the Great Depression so times were tight and tough. At that time my Mom ran small downtown cafes. Previously she had managed to get by peddling home-made sandwiches to beer parlors and pool halls. When not in school I spent my days finding places to explore and play. Places like the town dump, back alleys, upstairs parking lots, and the halls of the hotels in which we lived. I was the only kid living in the downtown area so everyone knew who I was without me knowing almost anyone.

            My first “family”, aside from my somewhat present Grand folks, were the people, mostly women, who worked for my Mom in her cafes. In the hotel coffee shop, there was the chief chef Art Smith, and his wife Evelyn. They sort of took me in during my after-school hours and saw to it that I was fed. Art contracted TB and had to spend a year in a sanatorium in Seattle 100 miles away. I remember accompanying Mom there to visit them several times. Art and Evie had become really good friends of ours, even though I was too young to appreciate them.  

There was also Helma, a cook and a baker who always had something special for me to eat whenever I came bye. Helma worked for my Mom for twenty years at three different establishments. They had become good friends. On my way to high school Helma always had a warm, healthy breakfast waiting for me. While I was in high school a guy my Mom had hired as a second cook, named Bob Wilcox, had come directly out of the Army where he had been a cook. Bob became a kind of substitute father for me, one who listened to my adolescent woes. He even helped drive our high school track team to a big meet in Seattle.

During my teenage years I was befriended by some older men who had formed a City League basketball team sponsored by the Bellingham Beverage Company. While hanging around their games at the Junior High gym I was befriended by them and they asked me to be their waterboy. I was flabbergasted with pleasure and soon had a fulltime group of new friends. The team was comprised of former high school players in the area and they usually won the City Championship. Of course, I showed up for every game, handing out towels and water bottles when appropriate. My main friend was Earl Nordvett. 

These guys became yet another substitute “family” for me as a teenager. The county amateur championships were played at the local college gym and our team won them easily. By then a former high school and university star had joined the team. Because we won the city league games we qualified for the State Tournament in Seattle. By that time I was friends with all the team players, two of whom worked for a large local market and delivered products to my Mom’s café on a daily basis. They all knew me as “Virginia’s Boy” Jerry.

I was flabbergasted and greatly honored when the team asked me to go with them to the State Tournament in Seattle. Two cars, eight players, and me went to Seattle the next morning. I was so pleased to have been asked to go along that I was bursting with pride. Unfortunately, our team lost a close game and that was the end of the season. We drove back right after the game in quietness. These guys had become another surrogate family for me.

In fact, one of them worked for the local professional team, The Fircrest Dairy, as the guy in charge of tickets. One day he asked me if I would like to be waterboy for the famous Harlem Globetrotters Basketball team when they would play our local professional team. Of course, I did so, and it was one of the high points of my young life. Sitting on the bench with the likes of Goose Tatum, Ted Strong, and Marcus Haynes was beyond my wildest youngster’s dreams. Here again, my surrogate family had provided me with friendship and joy.

I guess the main take-away from these musings is that sometimes “family” is where you find it. I know my Mom did her best to help me through these difficult early years, but without “a little help from her friends” things would have become very much worse for me in my early years. Many years later when I went back to see my Mom’s very first little café, it was empty except for an older lady sitting in the back booth. When she saw me come in she said to me: “Are you interested?” because unbeknownst to me the place was for sale. “No,” I answered, “my Mom used to own this place.” “Oh, you’re Virginia’s boy.” That said it all.     

LOGIC AND GRAMMAR

C. D. Clark’s book THE ENLIGHTENMENT is devoted to the claim that the idea of The Enlightenment is a figment of the imagination of the majority of thinkers writing about Western intellectual history. He spends over 500 pages tracking the use of the term “The Enlightenment” in his book by this name, and concludes that this notion is a figment of the Western scholarly imagination. It is a very scholarly effort, but I find its fundamental premise off the mark and thus confusing and misleading.

            Clark claims that there never was any such thing as “The Enlightenment”. Rather, he says, the term ‘enlightenment’, which derives from the notion of “shedding light” or fresh thought should not be used as the name for an entity that never existed. The proper word here, according to Clark, is ‘enlightenment’ with a small first letter, serving as a quality of something, not a thing in itself. In other words, he claims that the term ‘enlightenment’ should not be used as the name for anything other than a state of mind or the goal of education, etc. The idea and claim that there once was a period of intellectual history to be so named is erroneous and misleading.

            However, the fact is that the very title of his book involves the use of a definite article, while the subtitle “An Idea and Its History” involves an indefinite article, thereby seeming to instantiate the very thing Clark is denying actually exists. These not so incidental facts would seem to discredit Clark’s entire enterprise at the outset. However, his basic claim, that there never was anything corresponding to the name “The Enlightenment”, as such, is well worth one’s attention. Clark is claiming that the use of the definite article in connection with this term ‘enlightenment’ erroneously instantiates the existence of such a period in Western history.

            Clark’s term for this seemingly minor yet important grammatical mistake about “the Enlightenment” used to track something in history usually called the Enlightenment is an error of “reification”, which according to Webster’s Dictionary is “an act which treats an abstraction as a substantially existing reality”. In other words, Clark is claiming that placing a definite article in front of the term ‘Enlightenment’ renders it the proper name of a person, place, or thing. His overall claim is that no such period as an “Enlightenment” ever existed. This term only serves as a description of something happens to individual people not periods.

       To put it differently, Clark claims that any period referred to by this misleading term is a figment of the writer’s imagination. People can be “enlightened”, but no such period of time ever actually existed. His book, then, consists of his detailed and interesting tracing of various writers and thinkers who have used the term and/or claimed that such a time period and/or intellectual movement actually existed. Clark likens such a mistake to that involved with the term “Industrial Revolution” or “The Renaissance”.

            In spite of the fact that I found Clark’s volume interesting and worthy of some attention, in the end I think he has made a mountain out of the proverbial “mole hill.” Of course, such terms as the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘Renaissance’ can be mistakenly instantiated into designating a well-defined time period. They nonetheless serve as terms that signify a commonly understood reality in history. Does anyone ever actually get confused by such terms into thinking that they refer to actual “things”. Even Alice in Wonderland could sort such issues out. The basic relationship between logic and grammar need not be confused here.

            The remainder of Clark’s volume is devoted to an examination of how various international thinkers and politicians tried to make the most out of what was actually something of a linguistic misnomer. Although The Enlightenment was never an actual political movement, it did leave us with a great number of deep and important thinkers, in spite of perhaps having been misnamed. Clark explains the main ideas of a great many 19^th and 20^th century thinkers, along with the implications and sometimes consequences of their ideas very well.