Only Connect

Welcome to the home page of E. M. Forster Electrical Contracting

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas poses a pertinent question: “Gertrude Stein sat by the stove talking and listening and getting up to open the door and go up to various people talking and listening. She usually opened the door to the knock and the usual formula was, de la part de qui venez-vous, who is your introducer?”

Let’s start with Grampa Moore

When he was a young man, Richard Garfield Moore launched his own walkabout a little like mine, to Paris. He left Springfield, Massachusetts, to seek his fortune in California.

Good idea, Grampa!

He bolted west in 1893, no doubt to the shock of his mom, who would have warned him against roving bands of Apaches, just as mine warned me of roving bands of homosexuals. (She actually did that. But if they were roving near me, I failed to notice.) My grandfather stopped off in Chicago to visit the Columbian Exposition, and was set upon by thieves who stole his new-life stake.

My great-grandparents wired him a train ticket for his return to Massachusetts, where he met my grandmother, and banged out five children in relatively quick order. My father was the much-delayed sixth — a passion project born nine years after his next-older sibling.

So without those thieves who fleeced RGM Sr. and drove him back home to meet Grandma — poof! — no me.

Back in Springfield, my grandfather married up, into the Richardsons of Springfield (my connection to the Mayflower, and through their English relatives the Stuarts, to the current royal family). Gramps would bootstrap himself up to run one of the major building contractors in southern New England, and help build the Williams College campus, where one of my brothers studied.

And based on all that expensive construction, he had a modest nest egg to roll in my direction, which I then turned over to Credit Commercial de France, in Paris, to keep it out of the hands of life-diverters like the ones who rolled my grandfather.

Around this time, I finished reading Howard’s End, according to notations I made in my calendar. The first two words of that book, in the frontispiece, would become watchwords for me: Only connect. But if I had been an electrical plug at that time, I lacked the converters, and extension cords, necessary to ensure a spark.

I was in fact trying to give Forster his due.

A week into life in Paris, I dialed the number of an ABC news producer in Paris, whom I hooked up with through the intercession of the father of a college friend. (Privilege, in action.) I met him in the newsroom, shook hands all around, and then he sprung for a delightful lunch at a café near the Champs Elysées.

A few days later I interviewed for a job as the weekend-desk guy at ABC radio international, despite my rudimentary French and nonexistent perspective on international affairs. I asked my interlocutor, a young man who’d obviously been forced by his superior to interview a no-hoper: “So, if the world ended on a weekend, in Paris, it would be my responsibility to share that news on ABC radio?”

He nodded.

C’est fini. Le monde a été tué! [Translation: It’s over. The world has snuffed it.]

But I didn’t get the job. And the world didn’t end. Merci à Dieu!

At least you didn’t hear it from me, anyway.