Merit Badge
Mayer, Milton
Merit Badge by MILTON MAYER T can't remember why I didn't make Second Class Scout. It wasn't wig-wag; wig-wag was, and is, my forte. It couldn't have been knots; there wasn't anything or anybody...
...Could it have been swimming...
...Scared to plunge in at the shallow end and take a belly-flop or, alternatively, crack my head on the bottom...
...But you can't have everything, and the right answer to Wellington's question to his troops, "Dogs, do you want to live forever...
...Fred Fry selig, the friendly family sawbones, felt for my pulse and said, "If you recover, you have got to walk two—better three—miles a day...
...It took me six months, give or take a couple, at a third to a half-mile a day (and no stopping for wind on the turnarounds...
...I told them that Russell and Whitehead went for three-day walks and produced the Principia Mathematica...
...You will live to be the last man alive.5* "It will be lonesome," I said, "just like walking...
...As for Mrs...
...said Will...
...They got fatter and fatter, bucking for a coronary...
...It could have been...
...It is lonesome," I said to Dr...
...Every noontime the Old Adult Christians did their lengths in the club pool for dear life (though life is not supposed to be dear to a Christian...
...is, "Yes, sir...
...And now, at the tag end of a high and dry life, I have passed the Second Class test and then some: The American National Red Cross Commends Milton San ford Mayer For Swimming Fifty Miles (Signed) Alfred W. Cantwell National Director, Safety Services Fifty miles...
...How about swimming...
...You wouldn't know anything to look at me, except to say, "What hath God wrought...
...Scared of the water...
...I never did try the back dive...
...I got thinner and thinner, bucking for a Merit Badge...
...As for the fourteen-mile hike—my feet still hurt a half century later...
...I was scared of the deep end of the pool...
...A nice, steady breast stroke, great for the white meat, and the kick makes a human clamp of a man...
...My friends and colleagues were digging their graves with the seat of their pants...
...MILTON MAYER, the Roving Editor of The Progressive, is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts and professor of the humanities at Windham College...
...You have the constitution of a water buffalo—of a bull otter, no less...
...Fred Fry selig...
...Baby Mayer invariably intuited that I was about to propose a two-or-three-mile walk and she had to wash her hair right now...
...You wouldn't know it to look at me —"a graying, patrician figure," as a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, newspaper described me (and that was five years ago...
...Ergo, we don't have to produce it," they said, "and ergo, we don't have to walk...
...Lonesome...
...Requiescat in hello...
...But take his war against away from him and throw him in the pool, and a half-hour's swim is interminable...
...And I don't mean stroll—I mean stride...
...Eighty-eight thousand and fifty yards, two hundred sixty-four thousand feet, two-and-a-half times across the Channel, a sixtieth of the way across the Atlantic...
...Let me," said Will Weeks, "be the first to congratulate you on your Merit Badge...
...Lonesome because my friends and colleagues were always too busy to walk...
...The only two people who could keep up with me, my Little Julie and a mad Dutchman named van Pes-ki, were nearly always two or three thousand miles away...
...War against makes the time fly...
...A veritable broth of an old poop...
...Swimming...
...It was lonesome because I couldn't get anybody to go striding...
...Will Weeks, the friendly family sawbones in succession to Dr...
...But it was monotonous, monstrous monotonous...
...Scared of the low board...
...It was lonesome...
...But it was lonesome...
...Man is a warrior and his idea of war is war against...
...I don't claim to have done the fifty miles all at once, or to have done it fast...
...It's more stressful than walking, better for you, and sooner over with...
...What hath God wrought, indeed: an aged stripling...
...Even when he sublimates it—in chess, for instance, he'll swear that a three- or four-hour game wasn't longer than half an hour...
...The reason it was monotonous is that I wasn't swimming against anybody...
...I said (with a quaver...
...Now we Young Christian Men had formed a club—we called it an Association—some time back in nearby Greenfield, Massachusetts, with the motto, Corpus sanus in corpore sano...
...there wasn't anything or anybody that I couldn't tie up in knots...
...Several years ago Dr...
...Baby Mayer, the companion of my sorrows, take her off skis and you can't do a thing with her...
...So it wasn't lonesome...
...Swimming," said Will (firmly...
Vol. 35 • June 1971 • No. 6
