Meet Ralph

In a freshman English Literature class at Compton Junior College in California over three decades ago my English Professor tasked our class to write a rough draft essay commenting on the symbolism found in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown. I was a focused, disinterested, engineering student back then and was only taking the literature course because I had to. Our pedantic instructor, proud of her advanced degree from Ohio State University, gave me a D- on my rough draft, a grade which I deserved.  I was told to rewrite the draft and this time to pay more attention to the obvious symbols.

 

I rewrote the draft. I searched for and found every conceivable symbol imaginable, and some unimaginable ones which would have made even Hawthorne himself blush—the  rocks, the sun, the moon, the trees, the sky, the weather, ad infinitum. My audacious reasoning for my selection was surprisingly convincing to my Ohio State professor with her advanced degree. So impressed was she that my D- became an A+. I still have a little trouble understanding what the hell Hawthorne was trying to say but what I did discover that day was the importance of being more observant and of the power, of the written word.

 

I continued being a nerd and eventually earned a degree in mechanical engineering followed by a thirty-year career designing, building and commissioning inanimate power plants in third world countries. But I remembered to pay more attention this time. Attention to the world around me.

 

As a retired engineer and octogenarian, I have decided to try to describe that world through both memoir and fiction. Other writers have cautioned me to only write about what I know something about. Since I was born a dirt-poor, white, redneck child from Arkansas I have decided to write about that world..