Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [1]
My agent, Carolyn Swayze, took a flier on me with my first mystery novel. Without her patience and persistence in trying to find someone else to take a chance on me, I wouldn’t be writing this acknowledgment. You’re the best, Carolyn! (Thanks also to Kris Rothstein.)
In Marian Lizzi, super-editor, Carolyn found a kindred spirit and lover of Benjamin Franklin. Her patience helped guide me gently through a process that was completely alien to me. I’m sure it was occasionally painful and frustrating, but she never made it seem so. I wish for every author an editor like Marian—and her super-assistant, Christina Lundy.
To those who reviewed this text, Hilary Drain, Jade Spalding, and Don MacPherson (and Mom, but she gets her own mention later), your words of wisdom, grammatical suggestions, and encouragement helped make this book a reality. Thank you.
I talked to a bunch of people during the thirteen weeks and after about the various virtues. You’ll see their names scattered throughout the book, so I won’t repeat them here. Thanks to all of you for your help and direction.
What can I say about Leland and Faye Gunn? I know everybody says that they have the best parents in the world, but they’re lying because I have the best parents in the world. They taught me right from wrong.
Life can be tough, whether you’re trying to be a better person or just trying to get through the day. It helps to have great partners. I’ve got the greatest. My wife, Michelle, and my children, Kelsey, Harper, and Darcy, make my life, virtuous or not, special and interesting. This book is dedicated to them.
{PROLOGUE}
The Wife, the Sloth, and Virtuous Ben
I AM A SLOTH.
Or so says my wife.
In a moment of mental weakness, I asked my spouse about her perceptions of me: good qualities, bad qualities, areas for improvement. The animal thing was a throwaway—a little humor to lighten the mood. If I were an animal, what would I be? That’s when she hit me with sloth. My companion to the grave thinks of me as a tree-hanging herbivore.
{He is ill clothed that is bare of virtue.}
Maybe, I told myself, she had mis- taken the sloth for another animal. Bright as she is, she’s no zoologist. Did she know that up to two-thirds of a sloth’s body weight consists of the contents of its stomach? Did she know that a sloth can muster the ambition to poop and pee only once a week? Did she know that their only real defense is to move so slowly that predators miss them altogether, walking right past without even noticing?
Surely she meant to say shark . . . or stallion. I’d have taken stallion in a heartbeat.
“Why?” I asked, clearly compounding my earlier error. “Why a sloth?”
“Well, maybe not a sloth,” Michelle answered. I said a quiet, prayerful thank-you before she continued. “Maybe a hippopotamus.”
I blame Benjamin Franklin for all of this.
How could anyone blame good old Ben? After all, Franklin is the one figure of American history that seems so unabashedly un-blameworthy . Inventor, scientist, diplomat, politician, soldier, and, of course, printer. A Revolutionary Renaissance man.
Friendly and affable, Franklin charmed kings and commoners, loyalists and revolutionaries. As a diplomat, he excelled at emulating, to his advantage, the backwoods gentleman. He started a long and successful career as a writer by passing anonymous letters to his unsuspecting publisher brother in the guise of a sharp-tongued widow. His most famous accomplishment as an inventor (or philosopher, as scientists of the day were called) came through the use of a kite. How can you not like someone who conducts experiments by flying kites? He is, as biographer Walter Isaacson has said, the Founding Father “who winks at us.”1
So how was this brilliant, quirky visionary implicated in my wife’s matter-of-fact stomp on my ego?