“The Round Table” never meant to take itself (nor to be taken) seriously, because in the beginning, during the 50s, all it was, was a group from the city desk sitting down to a few beers after work on payday and having a conversation in real English without the constraints of grammar, sentence structure and Style, The Chicago Manual, and Strunk and White’s The Elements of, notwithstanding. Most old time, small town newspaper people didn’t get paid enough to think of their jobs as sacrosanct, nor as civic duties. A lot of them moved on to factory jobs when the benefits there started to look attractive during the late 60s and the 70s. The ones who stayed with the paper quit attending the Friday beerfest when the new blood showed up. The newcomers entered with their BAs in journalism practically tattooed on their well manicured fingers. Most of them could actually type. Job requirements started getting stiffer—and the job itself more coed than it had ever been. The conversation went through the years from sports and lawn care, war stories—to Machiavellian theory, pre-Aristotlean thought, and the division into Rationalism and Empiricism by Kant of western philosophy. Some of the lawyers and other professionals who formed the core of newsworthiness in a small town began to attend, too, bestowing the respectability on local journalists (and maybe themselves) that had always been a little suspect. The times, they were (Sorry, Bob!) a-changin.’
Mose became a friend of the cub on the police beat through a series of unusual circumstances.
While walking to his car from a performance of “I Remember Mama” at the community theatre, David Grey was blindsided by a pair of hoodlums on a rampage for drug money. He woke up in the hospital with no idea of what had happened to him. The police told him the story. He was lucky to be alive. And he owed his life to the most unlikely of heroes.
Mose had been a town oddity long enough that there didn’t seem to still exist anyone who could recall when he began to haunt the purlieus of this un-extraordinary Mid West town. No one remembered ever having heard him talk, or take a drink, or smoke, or eat. No one knew where he lived. He didn’t work, and how he survived was as big a mystery as where he slept at night, a secret likely to arouse maybe only token curiousity in a world growing daily more and more self-obsessed and less than concerned about somebody apparently as low on the bottom of the scale as you can get. The most readily evoked conjecture was a rumor that Mose had appeared in town at about the same time that the state governments, in a belated concern for the civil rights of human beings with mental problems decided to throw open the institutions and let them loose into an environment only just less Dantean than what they were being evicted from.
David didn’t meet Mose until the trial. The felons, fearing an attempted murder conviction, copped a plea so that nobody, including Mose, had to testify. A cop had to point him out to David and David had to run to catch up to Mose outside the courthouse.
David could hardly be blamed for his inordinate sense of gratitude, And from then on, he would seek Mose out and take him home for holiday dinner—and then for his kids’ birthdays, because Mose taught them words in Spanish, how to “walk the dog” with a yo-yo, and (of all things) origami. David would oftentimes take him in out of the cold and sit him in a corner (during “Round Tables”) with one of the bar’s sandwiches (which he would take a single bite out of) and a cup of coffee of which he would take seconds. For a long time nobody could get Mose to talk and there were some (not including David) who inevitably thought the worst.
Camp, one of the ubiquitous sportswriters, said one day, “Does your friend talk, or is he mentally challenged?”
David said, “I don’t think Mose has ever found anything worth saying.”
“Are you saying that he’s smarter than we are?”
“I’m not saying anything of the kind.”
“Does he understand what we’re talking about?”
“Most of time I don’t understand what we’re talking about.”
Convinced that nobody with a brain would have the self-discipline to avoid being lured into their brilliant debates, and annoyed that David would defend Mose, Camp began to try to draw Mose out, maybe to show David a thing or two about the propriety of “bringing a gelding to a stud show”, as he put it.
Camp asked Mose, “What college did you go to, Mose?”
Mose just smiled.
Drake, the city reporter, chimed in: “Maybe he went to the “school of hard schmucks.”
David said, “Now, guys…”
Camp said, “Ah kin saw, state ‘u. Hah, Mose?”
Drake said, “That would make him a latter day Diogenes looking for a pot to piss in.”
“That would be too much work for him. It takes intelligence to beg a boot to pour piss out of.”
David said, “Guys..,” when he felt a hand on his arm.
Despite obvious disuse, Mose’s voice possessed (as would that of a man who could overpower and subdue two drug-crazed mugs) a stentorian quality: “Intelligence as a concept is a human presumption. Its fundament is subjectivity. A human being is only as smart as he pretends to be.”
The pause was cut as short as possible for fear of betraying awe. Camp sputtered, “If intelligence doesn’t exist, what does?”
“Philosophy 101, evidently.”
“And it doesn’t count?”
“I don’t set the standards for those sorts of things.”
“It sounds like you’re still trying to figure out the wheel.”
“Somebody should—before the world gets covered with asphalt.”
Drake said, “The working destiny of the only intelligent life on earth will not always manifest itself in the most attractive forms.”
Mose said, “It is arrogant of one creature to claim sole custody of the intelligence on earth when he has all but guaranteed not only the extinction of his own presence on it but probably of all other living things.”
“We don’t read the signs the same way evidently.”
“They’re not signs; they’re symptoms: half of the world commits suicide by gluttony while it starves the other half to death.”
“What? And doing nothing absolves you of complicity?”
“It takes less fuel and oxygen. Doing nothing might be the most selfless charity of all. It might buy everyone else a few more minutes of life.”
Now while “The Table” was trying to figure out how they actually got into academics with a homeless person, David hurriedly took Mose out the door and on the road.
David never attended ”The Round Table“ again except once three months later to say farewell. He quit the newspaper business and went to work for a foundation that funded (among other things) safehouses and meals for the indigent and the homeless. David’s enthusiasm for the job brought him to the attention of the higher-ups and they created a position for him with more authority (and more money than he would ever have made in the newspaper business) and decision making. His understanding of the problems of those in dire need is universally admired. His own source is never very far from him (He offered Mose a job. Mose refused. Mose’s wisdom is free.).
On most Sundays and on holidays, David can be seen with his family serving groups of people at one or the other of the shelters in his territory. Mose and the kids decorate the tables with paper figures: turkeys and pilgrims on Thanksgiving. David’s wife went through a bad period when he gave up the decent paying job for this one, but now, she pitches in with a fervor that sometimes outshines his. She says, “We don’t do enough for these people.”
There’s always something to be thankful for.
Noe.
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