Drafting
The word draft is one of those English words with not only multiple meanings, but the word takes the form of a verb, an adverb, an adjective and a whole array of nouns all at once . You can draft a draft of a proposal to draft a drafting specialist by sending him a draft as a down payment to help correct flaws of a drafty room before he or she gets conscripted in a new draft and you can do that while enjoying a cold draft while riding on a draft animal on a barge so long as it has a shallow draft or you can just draft behind it. I can’t image why non-native speakers find English such a confusing language.
I do lots and lots of drafting all the time around here. Let me start by narrowing the field of possible meanings for that. To begin with, I do not drink alcohol. When I tell people that, given my years of service on Wall Street, they immediately assume I am an alcoholic who has found my way to temperance with the help of something like a twelve-step program. Not so. I am a guy who moved to Italy at the age of fourteen and got drinking out of his system during one seven-day Italian Line cruise from New York to Naples, which started with my mother allowing me to order a Manhattan as we left the shores of Manhattan behind. I think that by the time we had gotten through the Verrazano Narrows I was done with the drink and done with drink. All through college I think I drank once during a gathering of my Italian language class (strangely enough) at The Chapter House, and after one wobbly-kneed walk to the mens room I decided that draft beer drinking was not for me. I have literally never been drunk since the few times I have had enough alcohol to get there, I think my body mass has precluded my crossing the edge of sobriety. There were a few banker’s Dewars and Soda shots along the way, but I almost always chose simply not to drink while others drank. I hate to be punny, but I rather spent my time drafting behind life rather than drinking drafts.
Secondly, boating, as in draft ships. As a New York banker, I got invited to a few boating excursions along the way. There was the fishing trip off Red Hook, New Jersey that landed no fish, but a few laughs not watching a guy’s girlfriend pee in a bucket in an open boat. There was an Americas Cup client outing off Newport that had me reeling from the rolling waves, gaining awareness that seasickness is the closest thing to death I ever want to experience. And there was a schooner charter out of Gardner’s Bay that got as far as Block Island with no wind going out and too much wind and too much heeling to for my taste coming back. And finally, there was my wish-fulfillment of owning a mahogany lake boat (think On Golden Pond) for use on Cayuga Lake, that I owned for two seasons and taught me why the two happiest days in a boater’s life are the days he buys and sells his boat. No, boat drafting is not for me.
As for the draft, as in conscription, I turned eighteen in 1972 during my Freshman year at Cornell. I was generally a year younger than my classmates, who all got their draft numbers from the lottery in our first Fall together in 1971. The lottery system was started in 1969 and numbers were drawn until 1975 though the last year anyone was called to service based on the lottery were those born in 1952. Those born in 1953 (my fellow classmates) were called in based on their date numbers for physical exams, but were not actually conscripted. My year was the first year we got lottery numbers based on our birth dates, but were not even called for physicals. My number was 353 and since the highest number drafted from the class two years my senior was 95, I would have been safe even if they were conscripting people from my year. Those were challenging days for all of us. During the height of the Vietnam War, 40,000 young men were being drafted monthly. A total 210,000 men were guilty of draft evasion and 30,000 of those actually went into hiding in Canada. I never had to choose sides in that skirmish, and I’m glad I didn’t have to declare.
During my early banking career I handled large insurance company clients. They were in the habit of issuing payment drafts rather than checks for beneficiary payments. This is a bit of arcane banking trivia, but a draft is actually a different form of instrument than a check. Where checks are prone to all sorts of fraud, drafts are assured funds drawn by the bank and thus lower risk to the payee. A draft is actually a bank instrument created by the bank, and given to a payee. A bank draft is a payment that is guaranteed by the bank on behalf of a payer. Issuing a bank draft requires that a payer has already deposited funds equivalent to an indicated amount plus fees to the issuing bank. Try and explain all that to a beneficiary that just wants to get their hands on the money that has fallen from heaven like manna into their eager laps. The process of checking with the paying insurance company and waiting for them to go through their records of payment to verify the payee and the amount takes time, time which payees do no understand or tolerate well when they are standing their with their paper bag waiting for their dead presidents.
The last few days have been cold and rainy here in San Diego. One thing I will say about this wonderful weather down here is that when it goes bad it goes really bad and when that happens it becomes very noticeable. Yesterday was your basic end of the world type weather with high winds, rain, sleet and even some hail. We were only missing fireballs from the sky to make it a biblical event of reckoning. Last night I did something I rarely have to do here and that was turn up the heat since I was feeling like the living room was very drafty all of a sudden. I could ski for hours in ten or twenty degree weather. I could keep our thermometer at 68 and feel positively balmy, but here in the land of eternal sunshine, I had to crank up the heat to 72 to keep a low 40-degree chilly draft off my neck. I donned my sweatpants and thermal shirt and settled in for a cozy evening of TV.
That leaves me a few definitions of drafting that completely apply to me. To begin with, my creative energies these days are heavily directed towards a mixture of writing and home improvements. I spend some time every day drafting stories for my blog and drafting compelling advocacy emails and reports for my various vestigial work activities. Composition based on synthesizing information is what I do best and enjoy the most. My writing is all about compiling story lines from a combination of random thoughts, observations of the world around me and light research that unearths new and interesting connections between facts. Back in my younger days I thought my creative instincts might best be played out through architecture and design. I went in a different direction for my creativity outlet, but when I get it in my head to do some sort of home improvement project, I take up the pen, or actually the CAD program, to draw up my ideas and to create a two-dimensional depiction of what my brain imagines. I took a drafting course in junior high school and have had a penchant for floor plans and design drawings ever since. I actually have more CAD apps on my iPad than I have writing apps. I use them for landscape design, interior decorating design, house addition concepts and now a granny flat concept we may want to pursue. The last form of drafting to discuss is that I consider it noble to be a beast of burden for part of my day. Today it was chainsawing a thirty-foot high Seed Stalk of an Agave Americana which adorned our back slope for a year and was now listing at 45 degrees from yesterday’s storms. In the end, I am but a simple draft animal getting through my day of endless drafting.