by Jeff Deck
Reader, I would like nothing more than to spring immediately into the story of my triumphal return to New England: first our brief alighting in Hanover, where my friendship with Benjamin was forged, and then further backward in time to my hometown and a stay with my mother. The multifarious wonders that Benjamin and I encountered shall be related in due time, but I fear that before every dawn come the primordial frights of deepest night. The deeds done in Manchester, and the wisdom won there, cannot be complete without an account of important events preceding them. Had I my druthers, I would not speak of Albany at all, but the truth of the Tulip Festival must out. I plead with you to conceal the following episode from your children, until they’ve passed the age of nightmares and can understand the virulent course that world events too often take. Further, I bid you steel yourself against the horrors I am compelled to describe, for you shall bear witness—in as brief and muted fashion as I can manage!—to the hoary, pustuled flank of iniquity. For in Albany I faced the worst day of typo correcting I would ever experience, and I pray that none of us ever sees its like again.
As we pulled up to the curb at my uncle and aunt’s place, we discovered that Uncle Bill had been waiting for us, seated out on the lawn playing with his dog Harley. He sported a bright yellow TEAL shirt, the first I’d seen in action since I set up the store online. Harley, too, was ready; the clever black Labrador bounded up to us, a favorite stick clamped in his mouth. Not to be outdone by husband or dog, Aunt Kristen appeared with a hug and a big tip: down the road in Washington Park, Albany’s annual rite of spring, the Tulip Festival, romped and rollicked, much like Benjamin upon meeting Harley.
Finding a parking spot down near the festivities proved to be a trial that required advanced skill checks in Patience, Navigation, Creativity, and Eyesight. “Everybody remember where we parked,” Benjamin remarked as we set off down the long road to the festival, which teemed with people celebrating the heritage of the oldest Dutch settlement in the country. Booths of assorted arts and crafts lined the dirt paths, and at the paths’ intersection stood a cluster of food wagons. We merged into the masses and began to visit the little tents, which ranged from mundane trinkets to some inspired pieces of art or its close facsimile. Oh, and gifts and treats galore. Candles and chocolate and perfumes and potions. And typos. Yes, we’d come to a swollen canal of errors, and now needed only to unplug the dike.
It began at the candy stand, with a tough one. They were selling chocolates called “non-pariels,” which I pointed out to the attendant should actually be nonpareils (from the French word meaning “unequaled” or “peerless,” testifying to the candy’s excellence). He nodded quickly, somewhat busy with sweet-toothed Albanians. I didn’t believe he’d do anything about it, but I also didn’t want to make him drop a sale, so we moved onward. Already I worried that if everyone was working in high gear, trying to fit as many sales as possible into the fleeting window of the festival, we’d seem more intrusive than usual. The first incident had been candy, though, always a sure sales bet, and the next tent where we spotted an error didn’t have the same feel. Here a few people browsed the paintings for sale, but no one was ready to actually purchase anything. One lady actively introduced herself to people while a large tattooed guy—the one in charge?—reclined in a seat at the back corner of the tent.
A laminated sign advertised that pet-centered art had been created by an “internationally renown artist” who shall go unnamed, lest the source of her renown become reknown. When the woman didn’t seem occupied with anyone else, I casually caught her attention, but upon mentioning the word renown, the tattooed man broke in, anticipating my objection. “That’s spelled right.”
The woman wandered away without having spoken a word. Clearly she didn’t want to be in the conversation if he’d claimed it. I turned, awkwardly addressing him across the tent while standing in front of the sign. I didn’t want to come at him, and he made no move to rise. I attempted to clarify, though I already felt put on the defensive by the ferocity of his claim. Well, yes, I told him, renown had been spelled correctly. “It’s just that it should be renowned.”
“No, listen,” he almost shouted, pointing an accusing finger in such a practiced motion that, for a second, I thought he might be Bill O’Reilly in inked-up disguise. “I wrote that sign, and it’s right. First I thought the word had a k in it, so I checked the dictionary. It said renown is a word—so it’s right.”
“Oh yeah, of course renown is a word,” I agreed. “It’s just that renown is the noun and renowned is the adjective. If you’d said she was a person of international renown, that’d be one thing, but internationally renowned needs the -ed.”
“What school do you teach at?” he replied. I couldn’t be certain if he was checking my credentials to see if they outranked his use of the dictionary, or merely mocking me.
I settled for my standard response: “We’re going around the country correcting typos.” For proof, I reached for a TEAL business card, which he immediately told me he didn’t need—because he wasn’t changing it. I wondered what would have happened if I’d said, “Actually, my dear fellow, I teach Platonic rhetoric and postmodern orthographic theory at the University, but I’ve deigned to give a guest lecture at your risible local college.” Would he have stuttered into an appreciative tone and asked me to proofread his entire tent—if I could spare the time? Somehow I doubted it.
I winced from his rebuke and trudged onward up the dusty track, Benjamin at my side. I hacked some grit out of my lungs and commented that we couldn’t do worse than that ugly scene. When will I learn not to say things like that?
We got a much more polite rejection of our offer to fix the next problem we saw. In yet another tent, a man in a smart beret allowed us to handle a small apostrophe problem after recognizing us from one of the news stories last month. Had our fortunes changed? Alas, he would prove to be the radical exception for TEAL’s day at the fair—and I’m not just talking in terms of fashion sense.
A triply erroneous sign taunted us from its lofty position upon a tent. Vidalia is not a word with an obvious spelling, especially if you don’t know how to pronounce it (hence, “Vadelia”—or even “Vidaria,” as I noticed in a produce market in Hoboken), and vinaigrette is moderately challenging, so I could see how “vinegarette” had happened. But “tomatos”? A ladder! a ladder! my sidekick for a ladder! As we continued to breathe in kicked-up dirt and tried not to rub too much against our many neighbors, I spied the promise of Island Noodles, complete with the authentic taste of “Hawiian Island Sauce”. Benjamin immediately rated this typo correction as a high degree of difficulty. The sign had been placed within the tent, up past the grill where they cooked their Noodles until the food achieved maximum tastiness, or, in island parlance, broke da mouth. We headed around the tent to where an underling wandered around without a clear purpose. Woe betide the traveler attempting to merge onto the road paved with good intentions, which too often forces you back down the exit ramp. Though we’d tried not to perturb the chef himself, the underling merely turned and began to relay our request. The busy Noodler raised his beefy head from that steaming grill and aimed a broad smile directly at us. Then, interrupting the question being passed to him, he provided a single word in a flat baritone: “No.” His eyes sparked with glee in the instant the word popped out, as if this was the most fun he’d have all day, though, granted, it probably was. His head fell back into the steam, our existence forgotten; the underling returned to his hesitant circles at the back of the tent.
“I once fell in love with a girl from New York,” Benjamin said.
“Oh yeah, and how’d that work out?”
“I got rejected. Pretty much like that. Though her ‘no’ was in a higher register.”
We spied some fresh produce and made a stealth correction to a sign offering “tomatoe” (there was the missing e that had migrated from “tomatos”!) before deciding we’d had enough. Benjamin looked exhausted, which isn’t something you see every
day, and I confess this place had an ill effect on me—I was turning grouchy. Escape, however, wouldn’t be so simple. As we headed down the lane leading out of the park, I caught sight of an oddity ingrained in wood, amid hand-carved goods in one last tent. “Excuse me,” I forced myself to say to the woman seated behind the table, “I noticed on one of your signs—”
“We don’t sell any signs here,” she corrected. “We sell artwork.”
After the beatings I’d taken, this response made me much less interested in sparing her feelings. I blurted, “Okay. There is a typo in your artwork. Unless it’s a pun? ‘Bon Appetite’?”
“It’s not a pun; it’s a phrase.”
I could tell she enjoyed the rhythm she had going. Oh wait, sorry. It’s not a rhythm, it’s a sentence structure.
Rather than take her artwork and slam it against my skull, I replied, “It shouldn’t have an e on the end.”
“Well, people are still buying it!” she replied. Then she loosed a long, evil cackle. Fool, the free market has triumphed over your silly normative spelling conventions! WUAH-HA-HA-haaahhhh … With her laughter ringing in our ears, we hurried from the Tulip Festival, gladdened at least to have escaped with our souls intact. Back in Callie’s steel-reinforced safety, I checked to make sure my own name was still spelled correctly.
After having been shouted down by the renown guy, shut down by the Hawiian noodle chef, and cackled at by the artwork woman, I expected to feel saddened, confused, and angry, seasoned with a generous helping of weariness. Brutal as the festival had been, though, some magic note of dissonance produced in me an ironic reaction against the attitudes I’d experienced. Yes, an incongruous light-hearted feeling descended upon me, and I opened myself up to the world with a curious receptivity. As Benjamin had noted in returning to the adventure, the value of the experience might lie in rolling with whatever came our way, and seeing where it led.
The next day we went hunting through Albany again, with a newspaper team joining us for the tour of basically a couple blocks. We introduced them to the inevitable towing signs warning of “owners expense,” and some assorted merriments typical of our quest, including a sign above a small flowerbed that read, THIS IS NOT A TRASH CAN PLEASE DONT LITER IN IT! Alas, with hate speech like that, the metric system will never find a home Stateside. The tour didn’t last long—we discovered that many businesses were closed on Monday in Albany, at least in the neighborhood we visited. With the hunt done, we had dinner with one of my pals from the old Washington publishing days, and met the young man to whom this book is dedicated. When last I’d seen them, Henry was a mere mound rising from the midsection of his mother.
Here our eastward return offered a strange reflection of the westward venture. As New Orleans had followed Mobile, so too would Albany be counterbalanced by a more hopeful locale. No place could have served that purpose better than our alma mater, where Benjamin and I had first met, as well as being the site of the first stirrings of my mad destiny. Somehow I couldn’t quite believe this adventure had nearly come to its end. I felt as though I’d only begun to pull it all together, that I needed more time to synthesize it and start doing things right.
It had been nearly a year since the perfect June weekend that had seen the genesis of the League. Now I found myself on the same postcard streets, on an equally stunning day. Sun warmed the Georgian brick of the campus, and the green crests of nearby mountains seemed to beckon. This time, however, I wore a desert-dweller’s hat on my head and a vinyl bag full of curious implements at my side. Benjamin and I had planned in advance to meet up with our respective senior-thesis advisers. Upon our arrival, Benjamin made for the Religion Department, and I took the opportunity to prowl around for fond memories and typos. I thought it appropriate to ply my trade in the very place that had prodded me to leave behind the nine-to-five office life, if only once, and go out and do something.
I’m pleased to report that, save for the single exception of a sign using tack-on letters that had no spare apostrophes available, every typo we battled on the Hanover Plain met its end. The town provided ideal typo-hunting ground, greeting me with a receptive heart or, if not that exactly, at least good humor. Main Street held few shops you’d recognize as national chains, and the friendly folks I found in these local businesses were exceptionally receptive. A candy shop featured a much sweeter experience than I’d had with the nonpareil seller in Albany; the girl behind the counter consented to my request to fix the spelling of “cocao,” but only after first explaining to her little brother, who was helping her, why the change needed to be made. She printed a new label and let him find the difference. At a local sporting goods store, the owner became defensive when I pointed out the WOMEN’S WINTER HAT’S sign, starting to say that someone else had made the signs—and then he stopped himself, declaring that he needed to take responsibility for the error. He granted permission for the fix and even hastened to point out a MEN’S WINTER HAT’S sign that I had missed, so that I could amend that one, too.
I don’t want to give the false impression that Benjamin slacked off while at his favorite Hanover restaurant. In fact, he introduced his professor to his newest hobby during lunch. Once you check the text around you with an eye to grammar and spelling, he explained, they leap out at you. By pointing to the chalkboard opposite their table, he immediately validated his claim. Therein lay a rendering of Guinness that seemed to lack its usual thickness (“Guiness”). Professor Susan Ackerman responded by noting that the Zinfandel had turned “Zinfendel,” smoothly bringing herself into our ranks. Benjamin brought me back to Molly’s as soon as we reconnoitered, advising me to have my chalk at the ready. The bartender, well used to obnoxious Dartmouth kids pulling stunts and tricks in his domain, still readily consented to some quick fixes. Fortunately, whoever had originally chalked the sign used approximately the same colors that I had, so nothing stuck out too badly. We had a Cheers moment as wait staff and patrons alike—including one who’d seen us on the news—joined in on the fun, asking us about our journey and giving us heartily up-flung thumbs.
We headed out to drinks with my own thesis adviser, Professor Ernie Hebert, who’d also taught Benjamin once. The specials sign outside the pub, Murphy’s, listed a curious element in one of its hors d’oeuvres. Mmm …“coconunut”. I wondered if it came with any Hawiian Island Sauce, though perhaps the extra syllable was enough to ensure extra flavor. Benjamin and I shared the tale of our journey with Ernie. As an English teacher, he could appreciate the TEAL mission, but he was amazed that we had survived a near-entire circuit around the country without getting our noses punched inside out. A professor to the last, even as we relaxed and knocked back beers, he pressed us for answers about what we’d learned from our travails, backing up Benjamin’s Chicago assertion that we were in it for us now, for the experience more than for the typo correcting. I appreciated his ability to dive right into a deeper discussion of the mission, even as I faltered in my attempt to draw satisfying conclusions about what we’d seen and done. After the drinks, Benjamin and I stood around for an extra moment outside, long enough to make a quick swipe (Benjamin taking out most of the second n and the ut after it) and slice (my own strike of the chalk against the board, converting the left side of the decimated n into a t).
We drove south that night to Manchester and my mother, Benjamin blasting his new Filter album to keep us awake. Reflecting on the “coconunut” correction after a day of such great responses, I made a decision, one that may well resound throughout the future of the League. “Tomorrow in Manchester, let’s not do any stealth corrections.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been around the country, and now I’m going to be back in the town where I grew up,” I shouted above the music. “I shouldn’t have to sneak around—I’m a native son!”
“I don’t know that everyone’s going to see it quite that way,” Benjamin hollered back.
“That’s okay. I … want to try it this way.”
He nodded.
“That’s fair.”
The pot I’d stirred in Albany would soon begin to foam over. By dealing directly with the people closest to the typo, I invited the citizens of Manchester to reveal themselves to me. I’d realize eventually that I could have done this with anything—say, carrying around jars of pickles, asking people to taste-test. In calling for a day without stealth, I’d effectively called for interactions of all manner and degree, and Manchester delivered more than I ever could have anticipated.
It all came down to Elm Street, the heart of Manchester’s once-and-future downtown. For the largest city in New Hampshire, with more than a hundred thousand people, old Manch Vegas (as certain wags referred to it) possessed a conspicuous lack of character. Elm was the only place where you could find a few independent businesses huddling together for shelter from the chains. The city had been making more of an effort in recent years to spruce up the downtown area, and Elm Street did boast a few newer restaurants and bars, but nobody shopped there. Why deal with the sparse parking and sparser selection of wares when you could head over to the mall or the Walmart on South Willow? A couple of blocks west, the red behemoths of former industry sulked over the Merrimack River on both banks. Some parts of the old cotton and locomotive mill buildings had found a second life as restaurant or condo space, but nobody had figured out how to use the considerable real estate to its fullest advantage.
We parked on Elm outside a used bookstore, which drew Benjamin in like an iron bee to a neodymium honeypot. I picked up the book Red Mars, deciding not to wait for the copy that Benjamin had offered to lend me. He called me over to the back run, where he’d caught not only a classic apostrophe for a plural (ALL AUDIO’S 25% OFF), but a new category of fiction: COMTEMPORARY. I could tell by the look on his face that he wanted to ask, “Are you sure about this no-stealth-correction thing?” These errors were at the opposite corner of the store from the register, where the only clerk in the store was ringing someone up. We were well concealed by overstuffed bookcases. How easy these could be to right. I shook my head no.
