True story: While running some errands the other day, I spot a middle-aged couple casually strolling across the four-lane highway. They’re deep in animated conversation, walking against the signal with oncoming traffic swirling around them.
These two continue chatting away as they amble right in front of my car, which forces me to a complete stop as I approach the right-hand turn lane. Eyebrows suspended, I wait maybe half a beat before tapping the horn and gesturing at the green light dangling 20 feet yonder.
The guy flinches as if I’d pulled up and beeped in his bathroom, then shares a couple creative gestures of his own. Next he starts hollering something about the sidewalks being blocked with snow, and where else are they supposed to walk. Okay, can’t argue there. Except that he’s making this perfectly valid point while standing smack in front of my idling two-ton CRV -- which still has the green, mind you -- with honking vehicles hurtling just inches from his waving arms. His companion finally runs back and drags him to the curb.
True story: Three powerful Pacific storms pound California with heavy rain and snow in January, forcing hundreds of evacuations; flooding major interstates; unleashing lightning strikes on two commercial jets; and spawning multiple killer tornadoes.
Despite urgent pleas from authorities, some residents simply refuse to heed evacuation orders. One couple puts their faith in a 2-foot-high wall of sandbags surrounding their home.
“Look at our house,” says the wife. “We’re well-fortified here. If any rain or mud or anything comes down, it’ll be blocked by our barricades and we’re stocked with food and water.” Police deputies ask the couple to sign actual forms stating they’ve been advised of the danger. They also warn them against pleading for rescue later, recounting the post-Katrina chaos of New Orleans.
Despite these painstaking efforts, officials report only about a 40 percent compliance rate by residents throughout the region. “We’re not going through all this because your carpet is going to get wet,” laments one exasperated sheriff. “We’re doing it because your flipping life is at stake, and other lives will be jeopardized trying to save you later.”
True story: Jet-setting White House party crashers the Salahis invoke their Fifth Amendment right repeatedly during a preliminary House hearing; so many times, in fact, that one aggravated committee member finally asks whether the couple is actually in the room. The couple’s lawyer reiterates his clients’ belief that they were entitled to be at the dinner, neglecting to mention the reality TV cameras that have followed them around for months.
Defending our right to our position is a big deal in this country. I guess that’s what being “free” is all about. But does anybody else feel like we increasingly invoke principle at the expense of common sense? Does it even matter anymore what gets compromised, or who becomes inconvenienced – even incapacitated – so long as we get what we want? Do we stop to think about the bigger impact … which, all too often, comes back to haunt us as well? Case in point: today’s headline about growing disenchantment with the ongoing economic stimulus effort, positioned right next to a headline about homeowners continuing to walk away from outsized mortgages.
My great-aunt Florence used to have a saying: “If God didn’t want us to use our brains, he would have stuffed our heads with ricotta cheese.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe he didn’t, and so he did. Buy hey, you know, I guess that's just not my problem.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
vital signs
“They’re right: I have lost something. I'm not exactly sure what it is; but I know I didn't always feel this... sedated.”
~ Lester Burnham, in American Beauty
Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? I guess you’d call it a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable everyman who feels compromised, confused and disconnected from his life; and about where those feelings lead him.
The film’s director once gave an interview which, in my opinion, summed things up very nicely: “We humans are designed to be hunters, and we find ourselves in a society of shopping and consumerism. There's nothing to kill anymore -- nothing to conquer or overcome in our daily reality. We’re not even really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's already been built; it just needs to run now.” What results, I suppose, is perhaps the ultimate form of emasculation … and the hands-on-violence-seeking members of Fight Club explore one way to recapture that connection.
It surprised me to find I was most affected by an earlier part of the film’s setup, wherein the protagonist (if that’s what you’d call him) attends a disjointed series of support group meetings to encounter individuals “with real problems.” And even though the film spends limited time with these people, to me that’s where the bona fide fighting occurs. A more quietly desperate kind of fighting, maybe, but no less brutal and bloody than the battles depicted later in the film.
I’m not sure if I’d have noticed this distinction even a decade ago. But in the intervening years, I’ve had the gift –- oddly uncomfortable term, but yes, the gift -- of climbing into the ring with people who have not been granted the luxury of disconnection. Maybe, like me, they existed for a time in that predictable, sanitized sameness that many come to occupy –- commuting back and forth to work, watching TV, folding laundry, wondering what’s for dinner. And then one day, maybe without any warning at all, they were jolted to the realization that they live on a fault line.
For some, that fault line might be an addiction; for others, a loss; for still others, a threatening health condition. But no matter how you label that fault line, there’s one consistent truth: It forces its inhabitants to redefine everything they know. They become exceedingly, even excruciatingly aware of a certain ... volatility. And those who summon the courage to exist in that space, those who muster the resolve to push back, are irrevocably, electrically awake.
You have to look very closely. Because outwardly, this awakening often fails to resemble the kind of thing a caffeine-charged society might expect. It may show itself as nothing more than an awareness of moments, a tone of quiet thoughtfulness, even a tendency toward stillness. But inside, the gloves are off as an old reality shatters, pretext evaporates, pride and vanity clatter to the ground like some gilded shield discarded.
The rest of society –- the ones Fight Club was meant to reach, I imagine -– often consider these people fragile, broken, weak. Interesting. Because I’ve noticed that as they struggle and thrash to get up, and get up, and get up, they frequently manage to lift others with them.
"When I was little, my cousin had a pregnant dog, just a mutt, who was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawnmower, and her two hind legs got cut off. The vet said, "I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She'll be able to deliver the puppies."
My cousin said to keep her alive.
So the vet sewed her backside and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn't spend any time worrying, she just learned to take two steps in front and flip up her backside, then take two steps and flip up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. And when they learned to walk, they all walked just like her."
~ Gilda Radner (1946 – 1989)
~ Lester Burnham, in American Beauty
Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? I guess you’d call it a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable everyman who feels compromised, confused and disconnected from his life; and about where those feelings lead him.
The film’s director once gave an interview which, in my opinion, summed things up very nicely: “We humans are designed to be hunters, and we find ourselves in a society of shopping and consumerism. There's nothing to kill anymore -- nothing to conquer or overcome in our daily reality. We’re not even really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's already been built; it just needs to run now.” What results, I suppose, is perhaps the ultimate form of emasculation … and the hands-on-violence-seeking members of Fight Club explore one way to recapture that connection.
It surprised me to find I was most affected by an earlier part of the film’s setup, wherein the protagonist (if that’s what you’d call him) attends a disjointed series of support group meetings to encounter individuals “with real problems.” And even though the film spends limited time with these people, to me that’s where the bona fide fighting occurs. A more quietly desperate kind of fighting, maybe, but no less brutal and bloody than the battles depicted later in the film.
I’m not sure if I’d have noticed this distinction even a decade ago. But in the intervening years, I’ve had the gift –- oddly uncomfortable term, but yes, the gift -- of climbing into the ring with people who have not been granted the luxury of disconnection. Maybe, like me, they existed for a time in that predictable, sanitized sameness that many come to occupy –- commuting back and forth to work, watching TV, folding laundry, wondering what’s for dinner. And then one day, maybe without any warning at all, they were jolted to the realization that they live on a fault line.
For some, that fault line might be an addiction; for others, a loss; for still others, a threatening health condition. But no matter how you label that fault line, there’s one consistent truth: It forces its inhabitants to redefine everything they know. They become exceedingly, even excruciatingly aware of a certain ... volatility. And those who summon the courage to exist in that space, those who muster the resolve to push back, are irrevocably, electrically awake.
You have to look very closely. Because outwardly, this awakening often fails to resemble the kind of thing a caffeine-charged society might expect. It may show itself as nothing more than an awareness of moments, a tone of quiet thoughtfulness, even a tendency toward stillness. But inside, the gloves are off as an old reality shatters, pretext evaporates, pride and vanity clatter to the ground like some gilded shield discarded.
The rest of society –- the ones Fight Club was meant to reach, I imagine -– often consider these people fragile, broken, weak. Interesting. Because I’ve noticed that as they struggle and thrash to get up, and get up, and get up, they frequently manage to lift others with them.
"When I was little, my cousin had a pregnant dog, just a mutt, who was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawnmower, and her two hind legs got cut off. The vet said, "I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She'll be able to deliver the puppies."
My cousin said to keep her alive.
So the vet sewed her backside and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn't spend any time worrying, she just learned to take two steps in front and flip up her backside, then take two steps and flip up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. And when they learned to walk, they all walked just like her."
~ Gilda Radner (1946 – 1989)
Sunday, January 10, 2010
in the cards
Before my grandmother suffered the stroke that would eventually debilitate her, she'd apparently meant to give me something. I learned this weeks after we moved her cross-country from an urgent care ward to a round-the-clock nursing facility, when my mother was going through her belongings. In Grandma's purse was an old mass card wrapped in wrinkled paper. On the paper, written in my grandmother's wispy-thin penmanship, was my first name and the beginnings of a sentence. It's not clear what the sentence was destined to mean; my grandmother was evidently interrupted while she was writing. But it is clear that she wanted me to have the mass card. Looking back, she'd actually mentioned it over the phone once, the very last time I heard her voice.
My grandmother was always the kind of grandmother who loved with such stifling ferocity that, as a child, it instilled actual terror in my heart. When I developed a case of winter bronchitis, she'd be on the phone letting me have it for leaving my coat unzipped at recess. She'd follow that up with advice for such complex vitamin concoctions that we had to get my mother on the line for interpretation. Later, when I'd suffer breakups and dating fiascos in high school, each hapless young man would become the unassuming target of Grandma's wrath -- whether he deserved it or not. "You tell Eddie," wheezed my grandmother, whose asthma was no match for her hair-trigger Italian temper, "that I'd like to know how his mother could manage to raise a SON who apparently has no considerATION whatsoEVER for the upstanding young women the GOOD LORD has put into his UNDESERVING LIFE." Her ire winding rapidly into a frenzied, irrevocable crescendo, Grandma would then typically launch into a string of old-country curse words with such energy and gusto that she'd ultimately break off into a series of rattling coughs, forgetting to hang up the phone altogether. My mouth would continue to hang open for hours afterward.
Over time, age and a string of health challenges managed to mellow my grandmother oh-so-slightly. She still dispensed her hard-won wisdom with feisty candor. She still believed, deep in her heart of hearts, that massive quantities of garlic would alleviate just about anything. But Grandma's overbearing passion gradually softened from the fiery mama-wolverine variety into a fiercely supportive loyalty. Always, her pointed words of encouragement were grounded in her devout Catholic upbringing, emphasizing the importance of faith and the enduring love of God. And somehow, nothing could make me feel more secure and protected than that familiar, wizened old voice.
As I wade through my own challenges today -- some so troubling that I'm virtually paralyzed at the thought of their outcome -- I find myself pining to hear that voice once again. Yet I know its time is expired. Grandma now sits in her wheelchair, her whispers unintelligible, laughing at everything, smiling at nothing, sealed away from the world's trials and triumphs and tears. And as she nods benevolently I clutch that final mass card like a talisman; the one wrapped in that wrinkled, coffee-stained scrap of paper, the one that bears my name. I turn it over and over and look at it, like some obscure baton that's been passed, straining to remember the echo of fiercely reassuring words that will never come again no matter what the future might hold.
The sentence scribbled at the bottom begins "I will always" before trailing off into nowhere.
My grandmother was always the kind of grandmother who loved with such stifling ferocity that, as a child, it instilled actual terror in my heart. When I developed a case of winter bronchitis, she'd be on the phone letting me have it for leaving my coat unzipped at recess. She'd follow that up with advice for such complex vitamin concoctions that we had to get my mother on the line for interpretation. Later, when I'd suffer breakups and dating fiascos in high school, each hapless young man would become the unassuming target of Grandma's wrath -- whether he deserved it or not. "You tell Eddie," wheezed my grandmother, whose asthma was no match for her hair-trigger Italian temper, "that I'd like to know how his mother could manage to raise a SON who apparently has no considerATION whatsoEVER for the upstanding young women the GOOD LORD has put into his UNDESERVING LIFE." Her ire winding rapidly into a frenzied, irrevocable crescendo, Grandma would then typically launch into a string of old-country curse words with such energy and gusto that she'd ultimately break off into a series of rattling coughs, forgetting to hang up the phone altogether. My mouth would continue to hang open for hours afterward.
Over time, age and a string of health challenges managed to mellow my grandmother oh-so-slightly. She still dispensed her hard-won wisdom with feisty candor. She still believed, deep in her heart of hearts, that massive quantities of garlic would alleviate just about anything. But Grandma's overbearing passion gradually softened from the fiery mama-wolverine variety into a fiercely supportive loyalty. Always, her pointed words of encouragement were grounded in her devout Catholic upbringing, emphasizing the importance of faith and the enduring love of God. And somehow, nothing could make me feel more secure and protected than that familiar, wizened old voice.
As I wade through my own challenges today -- some so troubling that I'm virtually paralyzed at the thought of their outcome -- I find myself pining to hear that voice once again. Yet I know its time is expired. Grandma now sits in her wheelchair, her whispers unintelligible, laughing at everything, smiling at nothing, sealed away from the world's trials and triumphs and tears. And as she nods benevolently I clutch that final mass card like a talisman; the one wrapped in that wrinkled, coffee-stained scrap of paper, the one that bears my name. I turn it over and over and look at it, like some obscure baton that's been passed, straining to remember the echo of fiercely reassuring words that will never come again no matter what the future might hold.
The sentence scribbled at the bottom begins "I will always" before trailing off into nowhere.
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