Education of a Wandering Man
1
IT WAS MAY 14. In a few days my class back in Jamestown, North Dakota would be graduating from high school, and I was in Singapore.
The date is one of the few I know from those knockabout years, simply because I had the good sense to write it on the inside cover of a book I bought at the shop of Muhammed Dulfakir on the corner of High Street. The book was Kipling’s Departmental Ditties, and my reason for buying it was that I had forgotten a line or two from a poem I liked to recite, “The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House.”
During those years I often recited poetry in bunkhouses in mining or lumber camps, and in ship’s fo’c’sles. It was usually the verse of Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling, but there was a lot of poetry floating around written for, and often by, the kind of men we were, occasionally printed but usually passed from memory to memory.
On that day several of my shipmates had gathered around a table or two in the Maypole Bar, a place no doubt long forgotten. Such men as “Hans, the blue-eyed Dane” of Kipling’s poem would have known it, and pr ...
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