The other day I was having one of those rough times. You know. Corona virus preventing me from dining at our favorite restaurant—-even our non-favorite restaurant. A President in “debate” exhibiting all the class of an orangutan in heat at a buffet dinner at a classy establishment. Smoke from the California fires blocking the sun from my sky. As usual when I slip into these funks I retreat into the fantasy past. I say fantasy because the past is never as good in reality as it is in remembrance. I guess I was hungry the other day because I started thinking about candy I ate as a kid. Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy. This was a yellow brick of sweetness that strengthened my jaw. This must have been a boon to Turkish dentistry. I think I still have a sliver of it wedged between my molars.
Then there was Lik-m-aid. These were small wax bottles of liquefied sugar with food coloring, red, blue, green. I would bite off the top and take a swig. One shot and I was ready to take on any Communist army anywhere.
I think a pack of chocolate cigarettes cost a dime. RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company must have been overjoyed watching us kids standing on the corner puffing away until we got sick of the puffing and faced the challenge of unwrapping the chocolate and discarding the paper. Once I inadvertently left a pack on the radiator in our Bronx apartment. Mother was not happy.
My daydreaming took me to the cardboard containers of popcorn on which was squirted a quarter cup of fake butter that had been simmering for twenty five movies over two months at the drive-in. And that stream of consciousness took me to the drive-in. Ah,the drive-in.
Remember the drive-in? Sitting in the dark in your car with your date.
wrapped in the secure anonymity of your automobile watching Raymond Burr in Rodan. Drive-ins were especially attractive dating destinations for money-poor college students like me. Five dollars for the drive-in entrance fee, a king size popcorn, and a date. All I had to do was find a car. A classmate, son of a funeral director, was able to secure a hearse for the five-dollars-a-car special one weekend. We packed twelve guys in the hearse, parked it sideways and had enough collective finances to share a keg. But then suddenly drive-ins just disappeared. Gone.
And now, within a different context, they have returned, especially for testing for the covid virus. A different concept and purpose, true, but we can expand the drive-in mentality to include other services. Think about it. I just had a virtual medical appointment.
“So, Ralph. How are you feeling?”
“Good, doctor.”
“How is your blood pressure?”
“I think it is okay.”
“You don’t have an electrocardiogram monitor in your home by any chance?”
So I got to thinking. Since the pandemic will not allow us to congregate in waiting rooms, restaurants, political rallies, etc. all of which are petri dishes for contracting diseases, why can’t we use the drive-in as part of the new normal? Suppose we have drive-in museums? You drive-in, pay at the entrance, pull up to the first exhibit, experience the artistic moment, observe the timer, and move on to the next painting/sculpture/video.
Or drive-in gyms. You pull up to a designated spot, get out of the car, mount the treadmill, tread 30 minutes and move on to the next machine.
Or drive-in barber shops. Pull up to Guiseppe, he climbs in the back seat, you put on opera on the car radio, and there you are.
Or drive-in political speeches. The area can be divided by political party or by official position (senate, house of representative, president, coroner). You drive up to the candidate, they give a ten minute spiel, and you drive up to the next candidate. Think of how much of the money that goes into the campaigns could be saved and spent on some of the problems that the candidates say they are trying to fix? And think about political advertisements no longer interrupting your watching of Leave it to Beaver reruns. If you don’t like what the candidate is saying, you turn up the volume on your radio.
Or drive-in cardiologists. Pull up to a station, have the blood pressure cuff put on, hook up to the EKG machine, actually have a conversation about diet(avoid the potato chips) and exercise, and drive off.
Or drive-in dentists. You pull up to the dentist’s station, lean back and watch them work in your rear view mirror.
Or drive-in psychiatrists. Drive up to Dr. Freud, roll down the window, and tell him about the time your mother punished you for leaving a pack of chocolate cigarettes on the radiator. You can even recline way back in your driver’s seat to replicate the full experience.
And, yes, I understand there are limitations to my concept. I thought and thought and tried to figure tactics that might work, but I don’t think the drive-in strategy would work for gynecologists or urologists.
And, say, maybe we can use drive-ins to view movies, and all the cars are connected virtually so we can comment on what’s happening on the screen. Sort of like a huge Mystery Science Theater 3000. Wouldn’t that be something?
One early spring night, my father told me to follow him down into the basement. He opened up several drawers which held some cash and a few keys. He took the keys out and told me what each one opened what drawer or box, including something called a “deposit box” in the bank. “Remember what I am telling you,” he stressed several times.
“Why are you telling me this?” I was becoming scared.
My dad looked up at the ceiling joints for a while, and then looked down at me. “I am telling you this because tomorrow I am going into the hospital for a serious operation to remove shrapnel in my back from the war, and there is a possibility I might not come out of it.”
I stood there trying not to believe what he was saying.
“If I don’t survive the operation, you will be the man of the family and you will have to brave, very brave, and do things you might not want to do.”
I was nine years old.
Sunday night, in the fifties in my neighborhood, all the kids stopped playing hide and seek or kick the can or sitting on the porch steps yelling at cars, “YOU GOT A FLAT TIRE!” The streets of my suburban town emptied of kids because they were all inside watching Disneyland. My favorite segment was Frontier Land, especially Davy Crockett. He was my first example of bravery, and I still remember the final scene at the Alamo with Davy swinging Ole Betsy at the enemy…..which probably did not happen, but as the newspaperman says in the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.”
As I got older, all the legends of the screen that epitomized bravery began to be come fuzzy around the edges. As I began to catalogue and quantify and evaluate the world, my parents’ bravery quotient increased dramatically. Survivors of The Great Depression, they rose above their poverty and deprivation with ethics intact. My father, wounded in World War II, demonstrated his bravery and courage many times over along with thousands and thousands of other men and women who entered the conflict as underdogs and emerged as leaders of the free world….despite twenty-first century morons labeling those same people as suckers and losers.
And what about me? Was I ever brave? During my college days I marched in defiance of the “establishment’s” bigotry and greed. I even was knocked to the ground by an officer who took offense at my existence. But I did not feel brave, just a great deal of pain in my skull curtesy of the officer’s truncheon.
Perhaps I was brave when I taught high school. Actually, I think most teachers are brave. They get abuse from parents, from policy makers who think educators are overpaid and underworked (until they try their hand at it. I remember one pseudo-teacher running out of the classroom upset and frightened. She was not brave). Worse, teachers absorb abuse from some of the very people they are trying so hard to help. Yes, maybe I was brave then. I also think I went up a few notches on the bravery scale because I challenged conventional teaching methodologies and utilized the ones best supported by educational research. I took abuse for that, but I also enjoyed teaching more. And I think my students enjoyed learning more.
Now in the autumn (winter?) of my life, my concept of bravery has changed dramatically. Our culture puts bravery on a Rarity Pedestal, praising an act of courage as a rare and unique action found only among the best of us. But I think that is a myth. Too many people demonstrate bravery every day, not only teachers and health care workers and social workers and….well, just about everyone who gets up every morning and puts the kettle on knowing that the future is personally bleak and even forbidding. You know, those individuals living lives of “quiet desperation,” with no resources and no prospects due to acts not of their own doing.
I think there is a great deal of bravery out there because there is a great need for people to be brave.
I have Parkinson’s, and one of the nasty and depressing things about this affliction is that I know it is not going to get better. I know it is only going to get worse. And I have to face that, and, yes, I think it takes some measure of bravery to do that. The problem is that as the body grows weaker, so does the mind. I think my mind tells my body to be brave, but old age makes it more difficult for the body to respond. My body tells my mind, “Just let me be. I am falling apart. It is too exhausting to be brave.”
The colloquialism, “Old age is not for the faint of heart,” is a truism no matter what physical condition one is in. I have learned as a survival technique to accept the fact that I cannot physically do what I did at twenty-five or even at forty. I focus on the reality that I can look back on the happier experiences of my life and put them in a perspective. As Eric Weiner writes in The Socrates Express (if you read only one chapter of this book, read “How to Grow Old.”), “wisdom is seeing.” I see things better now than earlier in my life, and that is a huge plus. I realize the events and associations that led up to my being who I am now. I see that whatever bravery I can muster now to face the present and the future grew from the models provided by my parents and the real and fictionalized personages that I valued as a child. As Davy advised, “Be sure you are right, and then go ahead.”
“I think I’ve acquired some wisdom over the years, but there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it.”
When I was in college in the sixties, one of my dorm buddies and I were watching the news showing American dead on the tarmac in Vietnam. Stan suddenly said, “This is too sanitized. We’re sitting here munching on popcorn and drinking chocolate milk watching kids our age die. The Vietcong should invade San Francisco. Then the powers that be will end the war. It is just too neat. It is like that Star Trek episode where two planets are at war for millennia because they have made pain and suffering too clean and easy.”
I watch the news every night now and feel the same way. For some of us lucky people it is all too far away.
When I taught five high school English classes, the pace was fast and furious. Grader of hundreds of tests and papers each week, creator of dozens of lesson plans each week, form filler and recommendation writer made the days twenty-five hours long…often longer. Retirement is different. My lesson plan for the day might be simply, “Get a haircut.” Still, even without the professional commitments, some days are more hectic than others. Take last Tuesday.
Polley and I fill the car with gas, a more infrequent event because of the corona virus, go to the gym for our twice weekly workouts, then have to stop at the grocery store, Food Are Us, to pick up meals for the weekend. My oldest daughter, her husband, and her children, Daniel and Sofia, are coming down from Connecticut to celebrate their twelfth birthday. We discuss culinary strategy. Should we make barbequed chicken on Saturday or roast pork? How about Friday’s dinner? Sausage and peppers or a pasta dish? No, we always seem to serve pasta when they visit. How about pork roast on Friday and chicken on Saturday? What’s the weather forecast? It is hard to barbeque in a torrential downpour. We decide to not decide and buy two roasting chicken, a pork roast, and sausage and peppers. Oh, and what kind of cereal do the grandchildren like? All of it goes into the shopping cart.
Our next stop is the Dollar Spree store to purchase birthday plates and napkins. These were necessary items for the birthday celebration. We spent considerable time debating the aesthetic values of the birthday napkins, purple and yellow with a Minions theme or the pink and white Minnie Mouse ones. Daniel likes the Minions, Sofia, Minnie Mouse. We buy both and the matching paper plates. Cruising down the toy aisle we spot a jigsaw puzzle of the United States, an activity that Sofia might like, a trio of water pistols (hey, three for a dollar can’t be bad!), a Minions ball that Daniel might like and a container of heavy duty drain declogger. We both agreed that our drains were draining much too slow.
We got in line, following the directions on the floor to maintain the proper distance. There was only one person ahead of us in line. Suddenly a woman about our age, whose body formed an almost perfect “C,” stepped in front of us and through her mask asked, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I step in front of you just to ask the cashier if this is the line where I can purchase some helium balloons?”
Polley replied through her mask, “Sure. Go ahead.”
“Thank you.” The woman turned to the cashier, a teenage girl, and all we could hear was a muffled request. We could see both women nodding their heads.
The lady turned to us. “My mother is ninety-two and she is coming home from the hospital today. She had the covid virus, but she got better…thank God.”
Polley said, “I am glad your mother is okay. Why don’t you go ahead of us?”
“No, I can’t do that. That is so nice of you though.”
“No. I insist. We are not in a rush.”
“Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Can I pay for your purchases?”
“Oh, no. no.”
So the lady with the bent back, bent perhaps from the weight of taking care of her mother, picked out two balloons. It was obvious to us that the teenage cashier had missed the Dollar Spree orientation program’s lesson on inflating helium balloons. After she failed several times, we looked over at the line next to us which held only one customer whose cart was already filled. We switched lines.
Bad move.
The lady with the cart already filled with plastic bags was counting out change from her purse. I examined her cart. Two half gallons of milk, a loaf of bread on day-old- sale, two cans of tomato soup, two large cans of Hunter’s Stew, a package of diapers, a roll of paper towels, three cans of peas, and some other canned items I could not discern. The teenage cashier had five stacks of coins in front of her….several stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels and a pile of pennies. She seemed overwhelmed with the counting.
She looked up from the four crinkled dollar bills and the stacks of coins and told the customer, “You’re ninety three cents short.”
The lady of the cart looked around and even through her mask we could sense her embarrassment. She was a large person with a stretched out gray T-shirt and black pants with the tiniest hole in the right knee. She looked like one of those school cafeteria food workers who winked and gave you an extra two chicken nuggets. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small handful of coins and passed them over to the cashier who cupped them in her hand and started counting the pennies.
I mentally counted with her as she took each penny and balanced it on one of her fingers. She got completely thrown off when a dime materialized from the pile and she began recounting. Polley and I looked at each other and shrugged. I was wondering about the disposition of the two chickens and pork roast in our car being cooked by the ninety degree plus heat. I have this prejudice against food poisoning.
It seemed as if the entire milky way galaxy had revolved around its center twice before the cashier said, “You’re eighty cents short.”
The lady looked at her cart, trying to decide what to return.
Polley said, “I have eighty cents.”
“Oh, no. I can’t let you do that.”
“Please. I have been in the same situation.”
I could see the woman’s eyes moisten.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
Before the lady was even out the door, the cashier had bagged our items and Polley had paid with a debit card.
As I walked to the car, I looked at both plastic bags. Somehow the essentials in them did not seem so essential anymore. Somehow the slow drainage of our plumbing system did not seem that important. Somehow the reality that there is real and deep pain out there beyond our sheltered universe seemed more real. Somehow I realized that not all shopping sprees are the same.
“To the people who think, the world is comic. To the people who feel, the world is tragic.” Horace Walpole
I saw the giant blue and red monster truck rumble down my street and slowly back into my driveway. The Just Junksters were here and they lowered the massive pod onto the black surface where our car was usually parked. Hours seemed to go by before two burly young men, men whose muscles had muscles, exited the cab and introduced themselves. Polite as can be.
“Yes, sir. So where is the stuff?”
The stuff was in the basement…unknowing…innocent….comfortable.
My children had chipped in and arranged for Just Junksters to haul away the forty years of toys and games and old computers and ping pong table and play kitchens that had entertained them for years. My son had driven up from Maryland to help his mother sort and bag many of the items that the Just Junkster guys would carry up out of their home in the basement and into the dumpster. My children had committed acts of kindness, thoughtfulness, and charity since they obviously cared about our health (the basement had developed a serious mold problem). They wanted us to enjoy the paneled basement as our recreation area.
So why was I having such a hard time with this? I have this sentimental attachment to things. I always have, and it is a colossal weakness. Growing up I cherished my two groups of toys—-plastic army men and my Lionel train set.
They were my prime instruments of my youthful fancy. When the real world of my Bronx elementary school became too much for me, I found comfort in the psychic bubble created by using my toy men to re-enact battles of the French and Indian War or losing myself in developing a transportation system in the town of Plasticvillle.
Animism is the belief that all objects, places, creatures possess a “spiritual essence.” Many cultures throughout time have addressed mountains, streams, trees, and even rocks as items inhabited by spirits. I believe that if many modern policy makers shared this concept, they would be less likely to tear those mountains apart, pollute those streams, and chop down all those oxygen giving trees.
As a Zen Buddhist koan postulates, “water does not know it is water.” We assign qualities to water from our provincial perspective as human beings. We see what we can see, hear what we can hear, sense only what our five senses can determine. On another planet in another part of the galaxy, water might be a living thing. Another way to mentally juggle this concept of things as having spirit is to consider string theory. All material things are forms of energy, and energy can be interchangeable. The same atoms that make up our bodies were the same atoms at the beginning of the universe. . Rearrange those atoms and you have another life form, or even an “inanimate” object.
During my teaching career I remember a debate in class on what marriage means. As one young man argued, “So what does putting on a ring, a piece of metal mean? Why do two people who love each other have to get married?”
A young lady stood and rebutted, “the ring has no meaning unless you put meaning into it. It’s like all symbols.”
That was my problem. I invested too much meaning in things, made too many associations with items that had lost their function. I saw the Just Junkster guys carry out the toy kitchen, a multi-colored plastic amalgam of stove, fridge and microwave upon which my children had cooked plastic pancakes for me. Up the stairs and into the dumpster went the rocking chair that our first child rocked to and fro, Madame Alexander doll lovingly caressed in her small arms as she watched Sesame Street.
The basement gave up the cardboard boxes of games that occupied the minds of Christie, Becky, Meredith and Jim during their childhood summers: Life, Masterpiece, Monopoly, Scattergories, Operation. On the way out the front door, a blue token from Risk tried to make its escape by leaping from the bag.
The board games were followed by the toy cameras and the electronic games, the joysticks and controllers and switches for Nintendo. Up out of the basement and into the junk pile in the driveway went thousands of plastic pieces, plastic tokens, plastic doughnuts, plastic fried eggs, plastic spatulas, plastic medical kits, plastic pumpkins, trophies earned for achievement and trophies earned for participation…Up out of the basement and into the junk pile went thousands of memories.
I remember a moment when the truth associated with a thing destroyed a far bigger and more important belief. One day when I was about fifteen or so, I was working in my father’s basement helping him with installing some outlets on his workbench. He pointed to a square item he had suspended by a string from a wooden beam.
“See that hanging from the beam?”
I nodded.
“Take it down and look at it.”
I obeyed. It was a piece of hammered copper art. I recognized it. The image was of a deer standing sideways to the viewer.
My father stripped another piece of wire. “See the name hammered at the bottom? That is my brother’s name. He made that.”
My dad’s brother had died way before I was born, the uncle whom I had never met and for whom I was named.
My dad continued. “I don’t have many things from him. Just a couple of pictures. So I am glad I found that.”
I looked up. “Dad. I made this…in shop class.”
I will never forget the look of disappointment on his face, and I regret, will forever regret, telling him the truth. I had destroyed my dad’s association with that thing.
The dumpster was almost full. I went outside just in time to see one of the Just Junkster guys toss a small wooden cradle that a relative, now deceased, had constructed for my second oldest onto the junk pile. That one item was one of my Rosebuds. There were many Rosebuds in that discard pile that day. Things evoke memories, and memories recall stories, and, as the protagonist says in the movie, Memorial Day, “things inspire stories, and stories last forever, but only if you tell them.” Up into the Junk Junkster went things, memories and stories, all into the eternity of oblivion.
I stood in the doorway in the front of my home, hands braced on the frame and watched as the two men plugged themselves in the cab of the truck, watched the red brake lights come on, watched as the Just Junksters truck pulled out of my driveway. I exhaled, sighed, and whispered, “Goodbye, stuff.”
One of the more painful parts of growing old is losing. Losing things, losing physical abilities, losing memories, losing people.
My wife asked me, “You want to see the basement now?”
I didn’t want to see the basement. There was nothing in the basement for me. The basement was empty…..so was I…..well, emptier.
Disposing of all that stuff was the right thing to do, but doing the right thing is often the hardest thing to do. The junk had to go…..I guess it just depends on what one thinks junk is.
First, a disclaimer.
I know compared to many others, I am very fortunate. I am retired.
I can stay inside and try to insulate myself from the Corona virus
without too much disruption of my life.
I have not suddenly found myself unemployed, through no fault of my own,
with children to raise and now to tutor, worrying over how to pay my
bills. This pandemic is not funny. Of all the quotes I have come across in my
seventy plus years, the one that seemingly always applies is by Horace
Walpole. “To the people who think, the
world is comic. To the people who feel,
the world is tragic.”
There is a great deal of feeling out there, an enormous amount
of pain and suffering, and I am not immune to that. But, to help retain my sanity, I can think
about my own situation which is the substance of this blog.
After three months of getting up, having breakfast, checking
email, reading my book, eating lunch, reading my book, watching World War II
documentaries, taking a nap, eating dinner, watching Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/,
going to bed, I lose track of the
days. In a Seinfeld episode, Kramer asks
George if he has any reason to get up in the morning. George’s reply, “I like to read the Daily
News.” I look forward to completing the
DailyJumble with Polley.
I pick up the newspaper in the morning and sift out the sports
section which is two pages long and takes thirty seconds to read. It features articles about toad jumping contests
in Bolivia, vine swinging competition in Angola, scorpion races in Costa Rica,
and backyard swing set challenges which are judged by speed of swinging and
height, and editorials about why there are no articles about baseball,
football, basketball, etc.
As I grew older, I got more face to shave and less hair to cut. But now that barber shops are off limits I am
worried about going for the Einstein look.
.I stopped shaving. Why scrape my
face with a sharp device? I shaved every
day for over sixty years, and it was time to try something different. But then growing a beard is not simply a
matter of developing a laissez-faire attitude toward the hirsutism of your
face. You have to trim the beard, and it is harder to see under one’s neck than
you might imagine. So now every morning
I try to shape the mass of white stringy stuff plastered on my face to make it
look more like that of a Roman with a British accent in a bible movie of the
fifties than a barnacled tugboat listing to port. It keeps me busy.
My wardrobe has shrunk dramatically. I basically have two outfits. The first is
what I wear about ninety-five percent of the time, a cross between pajamas and
sweatpants with a shirt boasting a slogan advertising some vacation spot…:Lake Placid…Winter
Olympics….and a sweatshirt identifying a college connection. Villanova, 2018 Champions. The other apparel is my Zoom outfit
consisting of a clean sport shirt. Pants
are irrelevant. When the pandemic is
finally over, I will find my pair of shoes.
There are days where our confinement does not seem so
bad. Can’t go to my barber shop so I don’t
have to make a crucial decision on where the electric hair trimmer my barber
uses is set to # 1 or #2. Can’t go to
the grocery store, so I do not have to decide whether to choose the rice pilaf
with garlic and cheese or the rice pilaf with mushroom and scallion. Can’t go to the fast food restaurant so I don’t
have to choose among the bacon burger, jalapeno burger, cajun burger, or the
western buffalo burger. Can’t go to
hardware store so I don’t have to decide on whether to fix the weather stripping
on the front door or the dented gutters.
Not having to make decisions can be very relaxing.
There are other days when I wish I had more decisions to make, days when my eyes are weakened from reading, and I feel like I am in a prison cell block, solitary confinement, just me and the tv, only three channels and two of them are online shopping shows and the third is a tv evangelist preacher. Of course, with cable I have six thousand channels but still it appears my best option at times is to train myself to become interested in documentaries about sheep herding in Outer Mongolia or searching for Attila the Hun’s burial site, or studying the mating habits of the dung beetle in Egypt. My fall back choice is re-watching episodes of Law and Order—the episodes with Lennie Briscoe.
The New Normal involves shifts in time. Since the days all seem to be the same, I
feel like an aspiring passenger standing on the subway platform watching the
train cars, each car a day, zip by without my ever boarding the train. Weeks fly by without any distinctive days in
recent memory. Where is the train going?
And then there are
days when it seems the train has stopped, doors not opening, and it appears that
the pandemic ride will never be over. There
is no destination…no meaning. Why is the
train not moving? Time becomes slower
than my breathing when asleep.
The New Normal changes health care. Zoom appointments with doctors are just a
little strange.
“Hello, Doctor.”
“Hello, Mr. Maltese.
How are you?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I see. Well, how are
you feeling?”
“Fine, I guess. How do I look?”
“There is not too much I can tell, especially since your
webcam is turned off.”
“Oh, sorry.”
Some time in early June, we decided to brave the elements
and venture forth to the hotbed of potential danger, the supermarket. I was a polar bear emerging from a fully conscious,
self-imposed hibernation, trying to shake the winter’s worth of sleep induced
by binge watching television. In the car
my glasses fogged from the mask wrapped around my nose and mouth, and my Darth
Vader breathing drowned out the radio.
As we parked the car in the supermarket lot, I looked at all
the masked people, all these Lone Rangers, extras from a fifties western,
pushing carts back and forth. Each one of them was a potential danger, and I was
a potential danger to each one of them. How did we get to this point that every one of
us is a threat…to each other?
For the first time in a while we have to make choices,
though some choices like the arrows on the aisle floors are made for us. Our gloved hands pluck boxes of Grape Nuts,
Rice Pilaf with Mushrooms and Scallions, Cheez-its from the shelves. The cart loads up fast. I can barely make out the words of the masked
cashier behind the plexiglass, but she seems nice and she seems careful. She is a threat as well, and I am certain she
sees us the same way.
The New Normal involves unloading the car when we get home,
washing our hands, changing our clothes and wiping down all the items we have
just purchased. The food we just bought to
sustain our lives can also be a potential threat to those lives. Funny, isn’t it?
Blanche DuBois, the protagonist in A Streetcar Named Desire,
lounges in a chair and muses, “Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons
in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity
dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?”
For me the trappings of the pandemic have created this irony
of unplanned time. I have this droplet
of eternity, a moment when I can do whatever I want to do, to complete promised
but unfinished chores, to read something I have put off reading, to revisit the
past via letters and old fading photographs, to write the book I have always
wanted to write. Here is
opportunity. But the sameness of the
days injects a kind of inertia in my thinking, not wanting to do really
anything. The whole feeling makes the concept
of heaven less attractive.
This is a larger lesson here, a lesson that repeats itself
in almost every age in every culture….in art, in literature, in music, in
history. It is a lesson that reminds us
of our place in the universe. Whenever
we think we are hot stuff, masters of our fate, commanders of our ships of
destiny, nature flicks our ears and reminds us of our fragility. Perhaps if we internalized this lesson, if
we understood the fragility and promise of those around us, we would be kinder
to each other.
One Person’s Guide to Watching Murder Mysteries on Television
One Man’s Guide to
Watching Murder Mysteries on Television
It is so interesting how one market closes because of a
crisis, and another market opens up so quickly because of that same
crisis. The media…..all media…is filled
with warnings about contracting the corona virus. When I was eleven, I and my eleven year old
friends, using our best medical jargon, would have referred to this situation
as “contracting the cooties.” So because we can’t “do this” or can’t “do that,”
we have a new set of media telling us what we can do. What we can do to unburden our solitary
confinement. See? Another market. And in that market are all sorts of ideas
about how to keep your body fit (buy a six zillion dollar treadmill) and your
mind sharp. I cannot afford six zillion
dollars, so I settle for a walk around the block and my one jumping jack a week
which I religiously adhere to.
As for keeping the mind sharp…We read through the newspaper
every morning, improving our synapses by mastering the Jumble, and we read our
books…a lot. But the activity that most
improves our neural pathways is watching several crime dramas on television simultaneously. Keeping all those plots and characters
straight is really mentally taxing. And
a number of those shows are foreign programs, mysteries from Sweden and Denmark
and Iceland and Scotland, shows that demand you read subtitles. Here is a short
list of what I am writing about: Broadchurch,
Trapped, Ozark, Bloodline, Bodyguard, Jack Taylor, Bordertown, Wallander, The
Killing, Marcella, Luther, Hinterland, Bosch to name a few. Sometimes when a detail shot of an Icelandic
newspaper headline is displayed, we forget to look at the subtitle and try to
read the Icelandic headline, as if by staring hard enough we can read
Icelandic. Quite challenging. Always keep the remote near so you can
reverse the streaming and read the subtitle.
Still, it gets confusing.
“What happened to the guy with the eye patch and rotten teeth?”
“That’s not this show.
You are thinking of the guy in the Swedish mystery.”
“Oh.”
“Wait. Isn’t he
married to the redhead who is a lesbian police chief?”
“No. You are thinking
of the captain of the Nardick fishing boat in Trapped.”
“Oh.”
“Stop. I thought his
daughter was in uni in London?”
“No. The daughter in
uni in London studying origami is in the show where the priest is the brother
of the one legged serial killer.”
“Oh.”
So, as part of that market trying to help us get through the
cooties, I am offering a guide to watching these shows. Think of it as sort of a Venn diagram, where
I am focusing on all the common elements of these mysteries. I am including Law and Order as the
distinctive element of this diagram.
What All These Shows Have in Common:
Backstories
All these dramas have backstories, and these backstories are based on
shady histories that are slowly revealed as the series progresses. I call these
Backstory Skeletons. The lead detective
once had an affair with the Chief of Police, or is divorced from the Chief of
Police or in third grade played Spin the Bottle with the Chief of Police. If the Chief of Police is the protagonist,
then the backstory is predicated on he/she having an affair with the district
attorney or the mayor or the medical examiner. Sometimes, in the worst of these
shows, the Backstory Skeleton consumes too much time, and we forget about the
actual crime they are trying to solve.
Law and Order, distinctively, has backstories, but
they are rarely in the foreground of the episode. Yes, Lennie has a drug addicted daughter and Jack
McCoy and Claire have this affair going on but it is only referred to by raised
eyebrows and winks. Their background
stories never interfere with nailing the villain du jour.
Protagonist Angst
All the protagonists suffer from some sort of psychological crippling
that causes them to never smile. They
could be in a theater listening to a stand up comedian or at home watching Funniest
Home Videos, or they could be tickled with a giant feather held by a circus
clown, and a yuk or a chuckle never
escapes them. This angst is borne from
guilt at something they did or should have done or not done. They feel responsible for the death of a
spouse or a child or a case unsolved or a colleague killed in the line of duty,
a marriage they screwed up or a parent they disappointed. They manifest this angst usually by drowning
their liver in alcohol. The Scandinavian
mysteries are particularly fond of demonstrating this protagonist anguish by
filming the anti-hero staring into the vastness of the ocean for about twenty
minutes. And most of the protagonists
are “rogue” crime fighters. They have
done something which makes them a societal pariah.
In Law and Order, distinctively, Lennie and his
fellow detectives never stare. They act.
Medical Examiner/Technician The shows always showcase
a medical examiner who can place a charred bit of fingernail under a microscope
and genetically reproduce the DNA of the suspect. Or there is a character with extreme high
tech knowledge who can recover a conversation from the broken bits of a cell
phone that has been smashed with a sledge hammer and deposited in acid for a
month.
In Law and Order medical examiner Leslie Hendrix has
that New York City sarcastic, no nonsense edge.
She can dissect a body while munching on a ham sandwich.
Eating In all these crime dramas we never see the
major characters eat. The protagonists
may sit in a diner or a fancy restaurant but a fork of food is never lifted to
their mouths. I imagine they do not want
any solids to absorb the gallons of liquor they have imbibed. And whatever food fare is offered seems
unappealing to me—sheep’s head, boiled herring, shark liver.
In Law and Order there are always scenes of Lennie
wolfing down pizza or Jack and Claire using chopsticks to stuff their faces
with a Chinese takeout lunch or Steven Hill munching on a chicken salad
sandwich in his office while he and Jack and Claire decide whether or not to
seek the death penalty. And there are
scenes in fancy dining establishments with plates of prime rib and grouper and
steak being consumed. Watching this
crime drama often inspires me to check the fridge.
Cell Phones Cell phones always work in the modern
crime dramas. The protagonist can be at
the bottom of a mine shaft, one hundred miles below the earth’s mantle with ten
thousand tons of lead between him and the surface, and he can still use his
cell to phone his assistant to see if the results of the fingerprinting are
in. At times my cell can’t call Polley
in the next room.
In Law and Order only the assistant detectives (Ray
Curtis, Ed Green, and Chris Noth) use cell phones.
No Backups In these modern crime shows, the
protagonist never calls for backup when he or she discovers the whereabouts of
the gang’s hideout. The hero and his
Robin know that inside this one building are two hundred bad guys armed to the
teeth with AK-47’s, hand grenades, bazookas and the odd nuclear device, but
they never wait for backup. “Robin, go
back to the car and radio the station and tell them our location and send
backup.”
“But you can’t go in there by yourself!”
“We can’t wait. I’m
going in!”
Most of the law enforcement officers in the Scandinavian
dramas do not carry weapons, so I suppose they burst into the villain’s den of
iniquity prepared to stare them into compliance.
In Law and Order the detectives ALWAYS call for
backup and usually follow SWAT teams while wearing ten inch protective vests
into apartments harboring one guy with a Derringer.
Clothing From
watching modern murder mysteries it appears that there are no dress codes. The female detectives often dress in what I
would describe as frumpy fraulein. The
male detectives wear apparel that indicates they are going undercover as a
homeless person in a slum neighborhood.
I find it difficult to discern the law enforcement people from the
smarmy bad guys when both types wear the same clothing.
In Law and Order, three piece suits and snappy women’s
clothing is the norm, except when Jack McCoy sports his 1950’s boyhood chapeau
with ear flaps.
Bad Daughters Who Do Stupid Things and Good
Daughters Who Do Stupid Things I originally thought this essential
ingredient of these crime series was particular to the ones produced in Sweden,
Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. You
know. The cultures in those countries
let their kids roam free and wild at about the age of twelve. But our American and British dramas follow
the same pattern. There are the
annoying rebellious daughters who do exactly the opposite of what their parents
tell them.
“Whatever you do Broomhilda, do not visit the herring factory
at night. Five girls your age have
already been found strangled there.”
“YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! I AM NOT A CHILD…..now can I have the keys to
the car? I need to buy some herring.”
These bad daughters are so annoying that I want to reach
through the television and throttle the little creeps.
The good daughters are almost as annoying, but are more forgiving
because of their naivete. The good
daughter falls in love with the rapist and serial killer her parent is tracking
down, and the daughter believes she can convert her new boyfriend to goodness
and convince him to join a Benedictine monastery.
What the bad daughters and good daughters have in common is
that both types will eventually be kidnapped by the evil doers, and, of course,
rescued in the nick of time…only to annoy us in another season. When the bad daughters are kidnapped, I have
been known to be more empathetic with the villains. Sociologists or psychologists or
anthropologists or any other “ologists” probably have a better understanding of
why this Dark Daughter of Modern Crime Drama is a staple of the genre, but I
could easily do without this addition.
In Law and Order, all family members are very
tangential, virtually invisible. Lennie
Briscoe has two daughters. One is seen in one or two episodes and the other is
killed off in another but that is about it.
So if you have read Tristram Shandy, all nine volumes,
for the seventh time, knitted the fifty scarves you are gifting next Christmas,
and completed the Book of 1,000 Sudokus, stream the crime dramas
available in your area. Watch three or
four different shows in the same day, and using my guidelines, you will be able
to follow them all without much difficulty.
If you get bored with their sameness, there is always Law and Order.
The professor packaged the question as an academic contest,
the winner receiving a lollipop. The
question was, “Why does anyone want to be civilized?” Or, phrased another way, “What does civilization
promise us?” I put on my thinking cap
(which occasionally metamorphizes into a dunce cap), and I won the
contest. I really did. My answer was this: “Civilization promises us
no surprises.” We drive over a bridge
and we expect to get to the other side.
We flick a switch and we expect to receive light. Most children are not big eating adventurers,
hence their penchant for eating at fast food franchises that offer the same
fare everywhere, the same dietary security.
A Big Mac is a Big Mac whether in Pennsylvania or Wyoming. No surprises.
Many adults are like that, too. I ordered a bison burger from a diner in Montana
while my buddy picked up a double cheeseburger from McDonald’s. As I munched away, he asked me, “How do you
know there is bison meat in your bison burger?”
I replied, “How do you know there is cow meat in your hamburger?” He looked at me as if mad cow disease had
infected my brain. “I got it from
McDonald’s.” So what?
The British Empire made a big deal out of offering
civilization to the tribes and countries they brutally conquered. The promise was that at 4 pm every day in all
corners of their empire their minions would be having tea. No surprises.
The problem, essentially, is that the promise is a
myth. Bridges collapse, storms make
blackouts happen, ecoli finds its way into the lettuce on a Big Mac
burger. When this happens, Americans do
what they traditionally do when promises are broken…they sue. Somebody has to be responsible!!! So it is hard for us to come to grips with
the reality of, well, the truth that we are not always (maybe not ever) in
command of our own fate. Nature raps her
fist on our door demanding us to recognize the reality that we are not in
control. That things, bad things, do
happen and all we can do is suffer through it.
There are other cultures, usually ones that are victims of
poverty, that respond to disaster differently, with resignation. Monsoons wipe out homes, war lords trample
crops and kill families, diseases wipe out villages. And the people in these cultures suffer and
cry and grieve, but they accept because their expectations are so low. They were not promised anything.
During the bubonic plague, victims blamed other people,
witches, and God’s wrath for the multitude of sins committed by multitudes of
people. How scared they must have been
not to have any idea of what was happening and why.
The second problem that afflicts our culture is what I call
the “Patience Quotient.” I learned
patience from my parents. My mother
would tell me a hundred times to wait until the tomato sauce simmering on the
stovetop was bubbling before I could dip my Italian bread into it. My father took me hunting and fishing. I spent hours upon hours sitting under a tree
waiting for game to come by or hours watching my bobber and anticipating its
being dragged under. During all that waiting
I was never bored. There is always
something in the woods or around the lake to watch and to observe.
But we live in a time where the Patience Quotient is
dramatically narrowed. My favorite
anthropologist (yes, I am a nerd who has a favorite anthropologist!!) is E.T.
Hall. His books The Silent Language
and The Dance of Life are worthwhile readings. So anthropologist Hall is appointed to a post
in southern New Mexico. He lived in
northern New Mexico. He also owned
horses. Since he had the time, instead
of putting his animals on trucks and driving to his new abode, he decided to
drive his horses, eighteenth century cowboy style, to his new post. What he learned is that time slowed. He had to travel at the speed of nature. Horses needed to forage away from his planned
trail, rivers were impassible because of sudden flooding and he had to wait until
they subsided. His Patience Quotient was
extended.
How dramatically different from our own demand society! I would ask my students to imagine a time,
say the eighteenth century, when the only time people heard music was if a group
of musicians came to town…and only if wannabe concert goers could afford to
attend. My students could not imagine a
world where they could not listen to their favorite music any time they wanted
to.
And I have forgotten the time when I could not have picked
up my mobile device to look up a question on Jeopardy…”Ah, so that is where the
Shetland Islands are.” Much of the
totality of human knowledge is on demand….wherever we are and whenever we want.
We want things and we want them right now! It is expected. The corona virus is unsettling for many
reasons, one of them being the inability of many of us to extend that Patience
Quotient. Why do I have to wait a couple of weeks, a month maybe, to go to the
grocery store to pick up some maraschino cherries, to go bowling with my
friends, to have dinner with my fellow workers at our favorite restaurant? We can only travel through time at the speed
of nature. And that reality unnerves us.
We are not very good at coping with uncertainty. Maybe none of us are. What events such as the current pandemic remind
us is that the certainties that civilization promises us are necessary for us
to navigate through life, but that in the universal scheme of things they are
not much more than wishful thinking.
There is a Simpson’s episode in which astronomers predict
that an asteroid is going to wipe out Springfield. Fortunately the asteroid shrivels as it
enters the earth’s atmosphere and becomes a pebble that bounces harmlessly off
a structure. Moe grabs a baseball bat
and yells, “Let’s destroy the Observatory so this never happens again!”
We should hold our leaders responsible for how they react to
crises, but we should never forget the fragility of our planet and the vulnerabiltiy
of the promises civilization makes to us.
Don’t get me wrong. I
still enjoy the Olympics. Every four
years I get charged up by watching athletes in 206 recognized nations (are the
unrecognized nations participating incognito?) embrace the comraderie borne of athletic
competition which supposedly transcends tribalism as they compete to win medals
for their countries and prove their governments superior to those of other
countries. We admire the grace,
strength, and endurance of the participants which is what it is all about,
right? Medal count? Pshaw.
But as I age, I think it may be time to recognize skills and
attributes and endurance of another genre.
I think it is time for the Senior Olympics, participation by people over
sixty in feats that test mind and mettle. Grace be damned!
And not only challenges that test our skills, but tasks that
seniors perform almost every day. I mean
Olympic events are fun to watch, but what real world context do they have?
Curling? I have yet to stand on a frozen
lake and try to shove a cheese wheel or something across the ice. Biathalon?
Haven’t skied through the woods and stopped to shoot something in a
while. Pole vault? Yeah, right.
The last time I vaulted over anything was when I twelve and jumped the
fence to escape Grumpy Leadenhauer’s ferocious mutt. And it has been quite an
age since my wife and I have enjoyed synchronized swimming. No. The
real world senior Olympics should have its institutional anchor set in the
concrete of relevance.
There would have to be ground rules. Some events may require couples who have been
married over twenty-five years, other competitions requiring single
contestants. No oxygen tanks permitted
or drug enhancements like Tylenol and certainly not Aleve. I was all set to make the proposal to the
Olympic Committee when I discovered other nations already have a real world
senior Olympics. I think it is high time the United States enters the
competition. Below are the events and the record times.
CHILDPROOF CAP REMOVAL—individual
Contestants compete to remove the caps off medication
bottles before they have to call 911.
Record: 4.5 minutes,
Olaf Jurgenson, Norway (Attaturk Hauptman was disqualified for using his teeth)
VCR TIME RESET—couples
Couples compete to change the blinking 12:00 to the correct
time.
Record: 2.5 years,
Amy and Arthur Richmond (Great Britain) (sadly couple soon divorced)
FLOOR ARISEMENT—individual
Individuals compete to rise from a sitting position on a
living room floor to a standing position.
Two environments:
hardwood floors and carpeted floors.
Record Hardwood Floors: Giuseppe Albertini, Italy 32 minutes
Record Carpeted Floors:
Adile, Turkey, 28 minutes
Hortense Michelob, Germany, disqualified for using a piano
to assist him.
EXITING CAR AFTER A LONG RIDE—couples
Couples drive one hundred miles and pull into a rest area
parking lot. Time begins when engine is
turned off. Contestants must exit
vehicle and reach rest rooms after stretching and performing self-triage.
Record: 12 minutes, Hercule and Francoise Bellalouise,
France.
(trivia note: Adi
and Adelina Ancuta, Romania, had to be rescued by the Jaws of Life, but were
able to compete in the next Olympics.)
REMOTE CONTROL—couples
Couples visit the home of one of their children, are asked to
watch grandchildren while their parents go to dinner, and after the young ones
are in bed, compete to learn in the fastest time how to turn the television on
and change channels using the six remotes available.Record: 2 days, 9 hours, Myrtle
and Hiram Blythen, Great Britain
(trivia note: six
couples divorced after the competition.)
WHY AM I HERE IN THIS ROOM?—individual
Contestants are placed in a kitchen and told to retrieve a
tool from the garage. Contestants then
answer a wrong number phone call, enter the garage and try to remember what
they are in the garage for.
Record: 45 minutes,
Facundo Alvarez, Mexico.
(trivia note: Orlando Marquez, Brazil, is still in the garage)
RECORDING RECALL—individual
Contestants are assigned a specific scene on a taped
movie. Contestants must locate the exact
location of the beginning of that scene in the fewest fast forwards and fast
backwards on the remote control. Another
measurement is how accurate the contestant is in stopping at the actual beginning of the scene.
Record: 3 fast
forwards, 4 fast backwards, 5 seconds near beginning of scene, Itsuki Hiroto,
Japan.
MEMORY FLASH—two
day event; couples
Couples are asked to watch Perry Mason reruns (other
programs are also used), and the first couple to recall in the fastest time that
they had just watched the same episode the day before wins.
Record: 24 minutes, Ahu and Amiri, India
(trivia note:
interestingly, six couples never realized that they had watched the same
episode the day before)
SAFE PLACE—individual
Contestants are assigned a safe place in a model home to
store important documents. Contestants are given a document to store in the
safe place and are called back one week later to recover the document.
Record: 1 day, 12
hours, Casa von Beck, Lichenstein
SYNCHRONIZED NAPPING—couples
Couples are assigned a beginning and an ending time for
napping, and event is judged by how closely partners rise from their slumber,
grace, and form. Points are subtracted
for snoring.
Record: 96.6 Points,
John and Ethel Cavanagh, Canada
Trial Event—NOT OFFICIAL EVENT IN REAL WORLD SENIOR
OLYMPICS—
SYNCHRONIZED RECLINING—couples
Couples are asked to raise their reclining chairs
simultaneously. Points are awarded for
degree of synchronization, noise level, and height.
Record (unofficial):
82 Points Maria and Antonio Escalnie, Italy
Well, fellow Americans, what do you think? Should we enter a team? We would have to consider training costs:
coaches, travel to and from people’s homes for practice, etc. There would be no dearth of sponsors. Think “Drug Companies.” But if other nations can compete, so can
we. We are the “We can do!!” generation. And it is not that crazy. Consider previous Olympic Events like Live
Pigeon Shooting, Tandem Bicycle Racing, Croquet, and Swimming Obstacle Course
(swimmers had to, in this 1900 Olympics, clamber over a pole and a row of boats
and then under another row of vessels in the Seine River—how real world is
that?!)
One problem for all of this is that young people might not
be interested in attending or watching the Real World Olympics, and that is
fine. We know that we can’t compete with
the younger set physically, but we also know what they do not know—that a wealth
of knowledge and experience is harbored in our brains—everything from the
true value of relationships to how to not panic when holding a baby with colic;
from coping with the suffering of unrequited love to how to hold eternity in
one’s hand. Our strength is in our
wisdom and our empathy and in our willingness to share what we know to be true
and valuable. That is the strength and the offering of older generations down
through the centuries. That and the ability
to laugh at ourselves. We know what the
young ones do not know. We know the
youths will become seniors some day. “You’ll see, millennial!”
Seniors, Let’s give the Real World Olympics a shot, dangnabit!!!!
Someone once told me “thinking is having a conversation with oneself.” A conversation I recently had with myself included sushi, a lake in Yellowstone, tether ball, snails, Frederick Douglas, oysters, handshakes, Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, not always being Caucasian, and Zen Buddhist koans. See? It’s all complicated.
The conversation started with the package of sushi I bought at the supermarket. I could see the oblongs of sushi rice topped with pink shrimp and dark purple tuna and my salivary glands went into overdrive. The old saying, “we eat with our eyes” raced from its hidden nook in my brain to the forefront of my consciousness. The problem was I couldn’t actually eat with my eyes—the damn plastic package that encased my sushi was resisting every attempt to open it. I tried prying open the clear plastic lid with my fingernails, a nail file, a screwdriver, all without success. Desperate, I searched in the kitchen cabinet for some C-4 before my eyes alit on a pair of huge scissors. My conversation changed from talking to myself to addressing the sushi package. “Okay, Sushi, I bought you!!! You are mine, you %$#$%# , off with your head!” and I clamped a big corner of the package in my scissors and squeezed. The package burst open, the plastic lid blew off, and I suddenly was sprayed with sushi shrapnel. When the force of the explosion was spent, I looked on the floor splattered with pieces of tuna and shrimp violently separated from their nests of rice, as fragments of pickled ginger and splashes of light green wasabi mustard seeped into the troughs of the tile floor. We eat with our eyes. I switched the conversation back to myself. “What difference does it make?” My brain is telling me that the food does not look appealing, but it tastes the same as it would if I pulled it out of the package whole, n’est pas? Still…..so the conversation evolves into an argument between me and me. “Eat the sushi—-it’ll still taste good.” “No, it doesn’t look right. It is not sushi anymore.”
Please understand, I have this constant war with my brain. To be more specific, and accurate, some part of my brain does not trust other parts of my brain. See? It is complicated. But I understand me. I understand that my brain is just trying to protect me. I learned in my binge reading of neuroscience many summers ago that the brain’s prime directive is to survive. That is its job—to survey the thousands of pieces of information flooding it every second searching for potential dangers and working hard to make sense of it all. And sometimes, to make sense of it all, it lies to us. Example: when you were a kid and your parents are driving on a highway on a hot August day, and you look out the front windshield and you see a water puddle on the road ahead. When the car arrives at that spot, there is no puddle of war—-what happened to it, and why was it there in the first place? The heat waves emanating from the highway surface confounds our brains. Our brains ask, “What seems to behave in that shimmery, wavy way? Water!!!!!!” So we see water where there is no water. I have learned that I can’t always trust my brain. See? It’s complicated.
And because our brain’s prime directive is to survive, we are, I believe, born to be bigots. I thought a great deal about that statement. We like to romanticize our cave people ancestors, huddling together around a fire, huddling in fear of saber tooth tigers and the dark, but basically loving people following a paleolithic diet, and who hugged strangers and sang koombya around the flames. Truth is all strangers to our fire starters were to be scrutinized and assumed dangerous. Villagers along the Silk Road may have accepted strangers because they brought trade, but they also brought disease and strange habits and they often carried weapons. The handshake became an accepted ritual of greeting because the stranger extended his right hand to show no weapons and thus no ill intent (lefties had a sinister advantage!). So the brain, obeying the prime directive, tells us we should be suspicious of difference—-any difference. In fact the brain would probably be quite relaxed if all it met were people who looked exactly like its owner. How boring would that be?
So our default stance is that we feel uneasy and insecure about difference. We like likeness. We like sameness. Our brain judges and says, “Same good, not same bad.” And this judgment by the brain is constant, never ending, as it sorts incoming information and tries to make sense by fitting the news into categories and slots and comfortable closets it is familiar with.
Our brains love to label. At parties when we meet new people we begin the labeling process. Where do you live, where do you work, where did you go to school? Our brains try to label everything so we can make sense of it all. We label people by the cars they drive, by their dietary habits; we label students (and students live up to [or down to] our labeling.
And when we find it difficult to label, our brains sometimes get frustrated. The truth is that all of us human beings are complex, but most of our brains like things simple. Actually, fascists and racists and nationalists and all kinds of dictators use this fact to their advantage. What they promise is that their subjects won’t have to think. They make it simple. “We good, them bad.”
Remember tetherball?
A professor once explained the concept known as the “Analogy Tether.”
All of us are tethered to a pole, and as we grow older, more experienced, and, hopefully, more educated, our tether lengthens, our radius extends to accept and even appreciate differences. Bigots can be very loving people. They just tend to love a very small group. Their analogy tether is very very short. Sometimes I think bigotry is very comforting, warm and cuddily like grandfather’s red plaid blanket. The best part of being a bigot is that you don’t have to think. Of course, the downside is that you have to stay under the small blanket. You can’t go outside, stretch that tether and bask in the warmth of the sun.
At the beginning of one school year, as the students filed into one of my classes, I was fumbling around my desk searching for a seating chart I had made, and I was rifling in a bottom drawer when I looked up, and a rather tall lad with a multicolored mohawk haircut, red and blue and green hair, stood in front of my desk with a smile on his face. I recognized that look. He was waiting for this new, old fossilized teacher(I was thirty-two) to freak out when he saw the coiffure. I smiled and, I admit, the sadist in me surfaced—I did not want to give him the pleasure. “I’ll be with you in a minute.” No freakout.
A shadow of disappointment swept over his face. I immediately felt guilty. I stood up and explained as I shrugged my shoulders, “Hey, I’m from the sixties.”
He shrugged his shoulders and sat down. My analogy tether had been stretched to include people, especially students, with multicolored hair.
We tend to make judgments based on our schemata, what we think we know. When we see something new, we search our mental closet to see if we can match it with anything familiar. Bigots have very small closets. And their logic may be sound, but thee premises are not true. “I saw an elephant. It was pink. Therefore all elephants are pink.”
“I saw three Moslem women wearing burkas in the town square. They were doing nothing but talking. Therefore all immigrants are lazy and suck up entitlements like health care and welfare.”
The beliefs of some bigots are so firmly entrenched in the mud of ignorance that even undeniable truth cannot dislodge them.
I was not always Caucasian, you know. I remind some of my relatives of this and they say, “Whatta ya mean?”
I mean that Italian immigrants (as well as some other European immigrants) were not considered white.
How can some of my relatives not be empathetic with new immigrants? See? It’s complicated.
What is also complex is how we address difference. For example, I struggle with the phrase, “people of color.” People who use the term “people of color,” are usually white people which confuses me because my schemata always told me that white was a color. If white people are not people of color than are they colorless, transparent, cellophane?
So are we all doomed? Is the human race destined for erasing itself from the face of the earth because we make snap judgments about the “other” based on hairdos or beliefs or eye color or pigmentation? Does our fear about the other cause us to ironically violate the brain’s prime directive—to survive?
I have a slight hope my species will prevail….very slight. I believe that dramatic change comes about for two main reasons: catastrophic events (dire circumstances) or great leadership, great leadership inspired by a long analogy tether.
Dinosaurs are wiped out by a meteor or a microbe and life changes. The bubonic plague changes the economy of Europe. World War II rearranges the map and politics of the planet. Or leaders change things by the force of their commitment and vision. Lincoln, Ghandi, King.
I think the first guy who opened up an oyster didn’t think,
“Oh my, this looks delicious!!” He/she was probably enormously hungry. I think the visionaries came later. “With some lemon juice and a dash of tabasco this bivalve mollusc would be a delightful hor d’oevre.” Or the first human to see a snail inching across his path must have been ravished with hunger to pop it into his mouth.
Later came the epicurean, “With some garlic butter baked in an oven I will wow my guests…cannot, of course, call it ‘baked snail.’”
On one of my trips to Yellowstone National Park I stumbled across Sour Lake. I spent some time peering deep into the grayish, yellowish, aquamarine colored water and thought about the first human who discovered that the water was sour. He/she must have been one thirsty homo sapien.
So do we have to wait for disaster to wake us from our slumber of bigotry, from our hatred of the other because of beliefs or skin pigmentation or culture. Maybe. The only non-violent way out of this morass, as I see it, is education.
In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, Mr. Antolini, the English teacher, tries to explain to Holden Caulfield the importance of learning. “An education grows your mind.”
Another way to look at it is that education stretches that analogy tether so we are not afraid of the other. We look at the oyster, the snail as possibility. We see other cultures as potential. An education helps us not only to accept difference but to appreciate the possibilities that differences offer.
The problem with this tact is this simple fact: before a child reaches the age of nineteen, he/she spends ninety per cent of his time out of school. Do the math. A school day is eight hours long. What is the child learning from that other sixteen hours? There is a Zen Buddhist koan (riddle) that asks, “Who were you before your parents named you?” This is often interpreted as “what is your identity before the culture you were born into filled your brain with values and beliefs?” Did your culture shorten or lengthen your analogy tether? So even if all formal schooling was devoted to lengthening and strengthening the analogy tethers of students, what do we do about those other sixteen hours of education? I don’t know.
I do know that Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, shared an epiphany that opened my eyes. Traveling north on the train from the South, Douglass expects that the towns in New England, having not used slavery as an economic underpinning, would be poorer than the homes in the South. He found just the opposite to be true—–the northern communities appeared more prosperous and healthy. In the South there were a few Tara-style plantations, but most whites lived in far poorer abodes. And his revelation was that slavery shackles not only the slaves but the slave owners.
New England Home
Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery decided to spend the winter on the banks of the Columbia River. The winter was rough, and food was scarce. The Columbia River had salmon, but the members of the expedition would not eat the fish because that is what the natives ate. Here they are nestled on one of the world’s greatest fisheries and their bigotry almost causes starvation. Another example of the bigot becoming enslaved by his own prejudice. See, it’s complicated.
Mark Twain described his six month enlistment in the Confederacy in Missouri.
His company ambushed a Union courier, shot him off his horse. Twain watched the Union soldier gasping his last breaths. Twain writes something like this: “I guess that is what war is all about—the killing of strangers that, in other circumstances, we would probably enjoy a drink and conversation with.” Our brain initially fears the other, and our culture feeds the fear and then the labeling starts—-wop, mick, rag head, yellow peril, yankee….and then the killing begins and we offer up our humanity to the “Same is good, not same is bad!” gods.
We can start to figure it out if we ask our brains to relax, to be secure, to seek out possibilities, to just ask the question, “Why can’t we all get along?”
I recently learned that the cause for incredibly lucid and
scary nightmares that attack people who have Parkinson’s Disease is not the
disease, necessarily, but the medications used to treat it. (see 2017 Blog, Perchance to Dream). So I am
blaming this latest nightmare on my treatments.
Then, again, before I fell asleep I was watching some uneducated bozo
with orange hair and a lexicon of five words deliver a State of Disunion
speech. I could be wrong. The cause
might have been my dinner of kale burger with turmeric and fennel pollen
aoli. Whatever the reason for my lucid
dream, I am recalling it here in as much detail as I can piece together—you
know how disjointed dreams can be.
There was this big hall, big and shadowy and dank and dark
gray. And people in gray uniforms were
interviewing/questioning other people not in uniform. My dream’s camera zoomed
in on two men in uniform, one inhaling a Camel, not the animal but the
cigarette and exhaling large puffs of cloudy white smoke. He had gray hair. The young man he was talking to was much much
younger, early twenties.
“So what did you do?”
The older man took another puff.
“I felt sorry for the guy.
He said he was from Honduras.
Where is Honduras anyway?”
“Not sure. I think South America.”
“Really? I thought it
was near Greece. He had a Greek
name. I think it was Greek. Adelmo?
That sound Greek to you? Man, I
got a lot to learn about this job.”
The man with the Camel shrugged his shoulders.
“So what was his story?”
“One of these days I am going to get me out a map and see
where all these people come from.
Anyway, his story, according to him, is he was a physician back in
Honduras, South America.”
“Probably one of those
‘get-a-doctor’s-degree-in-five-weeks-school.’”
“That’s what I thought. So I tells him, ‘Look, fella, you ain’t going
to practice medicine in the U.S. of A.’
You know what he says?”
Camel man shakes his head.
“He says he heard that certain parts of the United States
need doctors. Imagine that!”
“Some people will say anything to immigrate into our country.”
“Yeah, I’m learning that.”
“So then he tells me he will take any job—any job at
all—sweeping streets, picking fruit, collecting garbage.”
“Some doctor he must have been.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. I tells him if we give him those jobs we are
taking them away from our American workers.”
“Good answer.”
“So I look at #3 on our questionnaire, ‘Why do you want to
immigrate into the U.S?’ He answers that
he is a member of a political party and the members of that party are in danger
from gangs. He says his life and the
lives of his wife and children are in serious danger. He says friends have been killed by these
gangs.”
“I says to him, I says, ‘We have gangs here in the United
States. How does coming here solve his
problem?’”
“So what was your final decision?” “Rejected. He and his family will be on the first boat to South America…..do they take boats back to South America?”
“Break is over. You
want to take the next one?”
“Sure.”
Suddenly, as if materializing out of thin air, an elderly
woman with gray hair and a dress straight from the forties stood at the young
man’s desk. Her hands were folded in
front of her.
“Okay, lady. You can
sit down.”
The lady in the green dress remained standing.
The young official was half sitting, half standing.
“Lady, I said sit down.
I gotta ask you some questions.”
The lady in the green dress did not move. “I am accustomed to some preliminary bowing
at first meeting.”
“Huh? C’mon, lady,
sit down. This will take a while. Rest your rump.”
The eyebrows of the lady in the green dress lifted
dramatically. “I beg your pardon?”
“Look, lady, you wanna immigrate to the U-S-of-A, you gotta
go through me. So please sit down.”
The lady in the green dress sat down on the small chair in
front of the desk.
“Good. Now, what’s
your name?”
“Why, young man, I am Queen Elizabeth!”
The young man looked up from his questionnaire and waved his
hand holding a pencil. “Is that like a
stage name or somethin’…a rock band?”
The lady in the green dress looked up the high ceiling for
understanding. “Very well. My full name is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary of
the Royal House of Windsor.”
“So your last name is Windsor?”
“Young man, Royals do not have last names.”
“I sees in your family history here that you wasn’t always a
Windsor.”
Queen Elizabeth stared again at the ceiling. “Dear me, your generation could certainly
use some history lessons. We changed our
family name from Saxe Coburn and Gotha to Windsor.”
“So why did you do that?
Running from the law or somethin’?
I mean, you gotta admit it looks suspicious.”
“If you must know, there was, in the nineteen forties, a
great deal of unpleasantness going on, and it was not fashionable in England to
have German……shall we say, ‘attachments.’”
“Hmmm. Okay, Liz,
we’ll put that aside for now. Geez, we
got quite a dossier on your family and it goes back a ways to some powerful
guys. And you got some sketchy things in
your background—gunpowder plots, terrorists, some questionable stuff.”
“Yes, if you study closely, you will learn that my ancestry
is rooted in a number of kings.”
“Liz, I gotta tell you.
Kings in history don’t mean anything to me. All they were were the biggest and strongest
thugs on the block. When they plopped
their asses on the throne, they tell everyone they are descended from God. Who says?
I don’t buy it.”
“My word!”
“Liz, in this building it is my word that counts. So
let’s skip your family history, which, I gotta tell you is iffy, and go to why
you want to immigrate to the United States.”
“Well, young man, I have thought about it a great deal. At first I thought it was my frustration
with Brexit and all that folderol, but, essentially, I would like to come here because,
well, I am quite bored.”
“Bored?”
“Yes, bored. Whenever I want to do
something, there is always this big fuss and much ado about nothing. The other day, I told my escorts I wanted to
play skee ball.”
“Skee ball?”
“Yes, skee ball. One of my grandchildren
discovered the game at the beach in, I believe, the state of New Jersey, and he
bought one of them, the whole alley and those wooden balls, and brought it back
to Buck.”
“Buck?”
“I do apologize. Buck is Buckingham
Palace. I absolutely adored the game.” Queen Elizabeth turned slightly in her
seat. “It might surprise you, young man,
to learn I have become quite good at skee ball.”
“So you want to come to the United States because you are
bored in your present position?”
“Essentially, that is correct.”
“All right. Let’s
see. You know, every day we get another
memo telling us to be very very discriminating in who we let immigrate into the
U.S.A. We gotta make sure we don’t let
the criminal element in.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“C’mon, Liz. I was
surfing tv the other night, and I started watching a fight when a soccer game
broke out…a British soccer game……”
Queen Elizabeth looked straight ahead.
“Liz, that’s a joke.”
“I am not amused.”
“Hey, I’m just doing my job.
What we don’t need is to let in a bunch of criminals into our country.”
“Young man, if you had studied your very own history, you
would have learned that crime, crime of all sorts and manner, existed long
before immigrants began coming to your country.
That is a fact.”
“Okay, I admit it. I
don’t know much about England. All I
knows is what I see from watching shows from England like Benny Hill or old
movies. I always thought I could make a
fortune being a dentist in England. All
the guys look like they have Roquefort cheese for teeth…..Liz, another
joke. Okay. Back to business. Liz, what skills do you have?”
“Skills?”
“Yeah. What are you good at? I mean, suppose we allow you to immigrate to
the U-S-of-A. How you gonna make a
living?”
“Oh dear. Let’s see.
I am very very good at waving. I
have practiced since I was a child, and I think I have it in hand.”
The young man stared at the lady sitting on the other side
of the desk.
Queen Elizabeth looked disconcerted. “Hmm.
‘In hand?’ That is British humor,
young man. I do it quite well, the
waving, with just the right touch of enthusiasm without forfeiting any
dignity.”
“Okay, Liz. I will
write down ‘waving.’ Maybe someone
politico will hire you to be in a crowd.
Anything else?”
“Well, let’s see. I
can wait.”
“Wait? You mean
waiting on tables? That’s good. I’ll put that down.”
Queen Elizabeth’s brows arched. “Hardly.
I mean I can wait. When one is
the queen, one has to learn to do a great deal of waiting. Not just being waited on, mind you. Waiting for spectacular events to begin,
waiting for horse races, waiting for people to bow before you…..most of the
dullards never do it correctly and so you have to simply stand there and wait
for them to finish.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll
down simply “waiting,” and let whoever reads it interpret what it means. Anything else?”
“No, I do believe that is it. Oh, wait.
I can ‘appear.’”
“’Appear?’ What do
you mean by ‘appear?’”
“’Appear!’ Exactly
what it means. I appear at places. ‘The Queen
will appear at the Tate gallery, the
Queen will appear at the Opening of
the Royal Silverware Inventory, the Queen will make an appearance at the Dorchester Dedication of the City Tulip
Bed.’ Appear. I am very good at
it.”
EGHAM, ENGLAND – JUNE 24: Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh attend The OUT-SOURCING Inc Royal Windsor Cup 2018 polo match at Guards Polo Club on June 24, 2018 in Egham, England. (Photo by Antony Jones/Getty Images)
“Geez, I don’t know.
But tell you what. I will put it
down on your application.”
“Thank you.”
“Look, Liz, my co-worker is calling me over. I’ll be right back.”
“By the way, young man, I overheard your earlier
conversation with the gentleman you examined before me, and, for your
edification, Honduras is in Central America.”
The young man hurries to where the older man is standing by
a massive pillar. He is twitching an
unlit cigarette in his hand.
“Yeah? I see you
waved me over.”
“I did. How many
people do you see standing in line?”
“Couple thousand.
Just like every other day. Why?”
“Listen to me, and listen good. You and I evaluate them, and you and me get
evaluated by our bosses. And a big part
of our evaluation is how fast we
process these immigrants. Get ‘em in,
sit ‘em down, and make a decision. Three
minutes or less.”
“Geez. Three minutes
is not a lot of time to digest their stories, evaluate and make a life changing
decision.”
The older man put his arm around the shoulders of the
younger man.
“Let me help you, kid.
You know where the negative term for an Italian, Wop, comes from?”
“Uh Uh.”
“Without Papers. You
know all these terms like “undocumented immigrants,” “illegal aliens,”
“refugees,” “fobs…”
“Fobs?”
“Fresh off the boat. Kid, they are all
code for the same thing—-non-white. So
we make it simple. Whites-yes,
non-whites-no. Look over at your
desk. What is the color of that broad
sitting there?”
“White, I think, but her documents said there is some Celt
in there….whatever that is. She does
seem to know her geography, though.”
“First glance, what is she?”
“White.”
“Go over and tell her the good news.”
Then I woke up…….thankfully.
Well, that is my nightmare in as much detail as I can recall. I have to lay off the kale burgers. You know how screwy a dream can be….even the American dream.
