Carry On: The Gold Standard

In the mid-Seventies, radio station KJR had a contest: "$10,000 in gold has been buried somewhere in the world; listen to our clues, figure out that location, and give the right answer when we call your name on the air. Then we'll fly you out there to collect your gold." (Now, that would be a carry-on worth toting! I thought.)

My son Glenn, age 10 maybe, was determined that we could win if I would only listen to the radio (at work) every day and jot down each day's new pair of clues. I got into it, did just that, and we carefully tracked the clues using our Atlas, leading (we thought) across the Pacific, down through the South Seas to New Zealand and then to its South Island, and on to the cities Christchurch and Dunedin... (Meanwhile, contestants on the air were incorrectly guessing locations in Spain, North Africa, Hawaii, Central Asia.)

Then one day there came a clue about Scottish poet Robert Burns, which left me stumped--just had no idea what it meant. And the very next morning, of course, Glenn's name was called out on KJR, and we had 10 minutes to phone in with our answer. (First we had to get all the interlopers off our phoneline, strangers calling instantly to try to give us their answers to gain half the prize!) But with a minute to spare, Glenn got through to the station, and then came the moment. If we were on the right course, which New Zealand city connected somehow to Burns... Dunedin or Christchurch?

Sweating bullets, I flipped a mental coin and went for the bigger and better-known Christchurch. Glenn gave his N.Z. answer to the disc jockey. Total silence, dead air, for 20 seconds or more, then the deejay cleared his throat and said. "Er, sorry, that's not the right answer."

Aw nuts. Glenn was still happy, because he would receive a hundred dollars for playing the game on the air (money for a new bike). But I felt like another kind of carrion... How could I have misread those clues so badly?

The contest carried on, two more weeks of new clues and bad guesses, and finally one day came the correct answer: "Dunedin, New Zealand." Dunedin, I immediately learned, was a veritable den of Scotsmen and Burns lovers! We had missed by less than a hundred miles! I coulda been a contender--hell, coulda been a rich champion! What a ridiculous muck-up.

But the years passed, and around 1986 I left the US for a couple of years travelling the world, wearing a huge backpack and lugging a strong carry-on full of books. One stop had to be Dunedin to see the damned statue of Robert Burns that had cost us ten grand. Yep, there it was, on a park square, right near a Mexican restaurant. (No Latins to be seen but amazing mole enchiladas.) I looked up at Robbie, jotted down some thoughts in my journal, and moved on...

Two more decades pass, and now I sell books on the Internet; and for one sale a customer in England mails me US cash in a small letter packet, the bills for no reason hidden inside a 1979 brochure on the buses running between Christchurch and Dunedin! (Argh! Grabbed again by the clasping hand of fate.)

I'll be hanging that pesky flyer somewhere at the new installation, and if you hear me pathetically carrying on about Burns and En Zed (as they say Down Under), just remember, "The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley." But you gotta carry on.