The Original

As a child, Carl Jordan loved the games that required being creative and making things up, and felt uncomfortable with those where he had to use his memory. He even came to detest memory, failing miserably at his early piano lessons and being humiliated when not able to write the alphabet in the proper order. But allow him to play by ear, to use letters and words creatively, then he was in Heaven.

When he was seventeen, Carl got in a fist fight with the class valedictorian. Neither had ever used physical violence to settle a debate, but their argument over who was better, the composer or the musician, reached such heat that the two boiled over and degenerated into fisticuffs.

Most of the onlookers couldn't believe their fellow classmates could lose it over a reenactment of which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg? How fervently Carl argued that the player couldn't play Beethoven unless Ludwig had created it, and how the other vehemently rebutted that all composers are mute until a musician plays the notes. Mr. Jordan's temper went even higher when the class brain added, " ... and aconductorto interpret your high and mighty creator's scribblings!"

Through the year Carl came to understand that the several aspects of the creative process are all valid. And although he and the valedictorian were always civil after the brawl, still Carl championed the role of the

originator while Lionel went smolderingly silent.

Those who thought Carl's stand was intellectual and only in the head didn't know at what a profound level the artist held creativity. The proof came years later when he fathered eleven children, farmed four hundred acres, painted over two hundred watercolors, invented hundreds of gadgets and held thirty-seven patents. Carl Jordan didn't just talk the creativity talk, he walked the creator's walk, and in time, Carl was rewarded for his fertile imagination. He won enough citations and trophies that they fought for space on the fireplace mantel.

One day Carl's friends urged him to try his luck on a popular TV quiz show. Surely with his imagination and experience he would do well. As it turned out, the chief researcher and question writer was Lionel Fleming, the very valedictorian who had argued and fought with Carl in high school. Remembering that debate/debacle well, Lionel gave the Master of Ceremonies only those questions that required specific knowledge to answer, knowledge that would be gained only from memorizing. He figured they would stump the man who gloated on imagination.

"In what year did Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address?

"How many elements are there in the Periodic Chart of the Atoms?"

"How many men were on the Mayflower when it sailed to the New World?"

Naturally, Carl didn't get to first base. And Lionel Fleming got his long-held revenge. Or so he thought.

When Carl Jordan learned that his former classmate had deliberately hand-picked the questions, he couldn't believe it. How could an intelligent, well-educated individual, after all those years, stoop to make his point? Like most of us, Mr. Jordan had forgotten the which-came-first discussion decades before, so the artist/inventor couldn't understand why Fleming

was so adamant. Carl questioned his former debater.

After the discussion, which ended neither in raised voices nor fisticuffs, Lionel became depressed, distraught, and so frustrated that he seriously considered suicide. At home he fumed, "How in the name of reason could anyone, a successful artist/inventor at that, not realize that what matters most is the left hemisphere, the ability to learn, memorize, use logic and detail?" The only thing that kept Mr. Fleming from pulling the trigger was the demented thought that the weirdo artist would survive him and thereby win their age-old argument by default.

Carl wasn't into revenge. Or winning, for that matter. He felt sorry that Lionel had taken the decades-old difference so much to heart that it would affect his adult life.

A few years later, Lionel Fleming died. Not by his own hands or in a mental institution. Still, there was irony in his going. For the valedictorian was buried in a casket designed by Carl Jordan, a box whose lid slid shut ingeniously. Naturally Carl didn't think of irony as he bowed in church, for in spite of their differences, Carl had respected his classmate. Nevertheless, Carl felt some misgiving, that there was something undone between the two. Not who won the argument, but why such an intelligent man couldn't understand how committed artists are to originality.