As a boy at St. Antoninus Catholic Elementary School, I, along with most of my classmates, often wondered whether or not the Dominican sisters that taught us were actually female. Of course, we knew in some abstract sense they were; after all, they were called “sisters,” and the pronouns “she” and “her” were used to refer to one or another of them. Still, judging by the measures that we knew, we were uncertain. The flowing, ankle-length white tunic, gave no indication of body shape, and the square veil covering the head right down to the eyebrows cabined their hair. They wore shapeless, thick-heeled black shoes. Their faces were unlipsticked, unblushed, uncosmeticed. The features of those faces seemed uniformly angular, as if formed from sheet metal. Several of the sisters had moustaches or a chin whisker or two.
As far as we could ascertain, the sisters bore no resemblance to our most familiar models of the female gender: our moms. They did not wear Capri pants and espadrilles, did not wear makeup, did not use Clairol, did not buy Elvis Presley 45s, did not moon over the muscled arms of Cincinnati Reds first-baseman Ted Kluzewski, did not smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails, did not play canasta with “the girls,” did not shop with what my dad considered ferocious abandon at Shilitoes Department Store, did not use slang, did not read “Peyton Place” or watch “General Hospital,” did not freely dispense loving caresses, and did not smile with both mouth and eyes when speaking to us. And while all the sisters wore a plain gold wedding band, we were given to understand that it symbolized their marriage to Jesus Christ, a state of wedlock that, even in our prepubescent naiveté, we knew was nothing like the one that united our moms and dads.
Some of us, the proto-Darwinians, I suppose, speculated that the sisters might be a subset of the female gender, evolved specifically for the ascetic religious life of the Dominican order. Others of us, the proto-Lamarckians influenced by the science-fiction movies we flocked to see, held that the sisters had once been fully gendered females but had undergone a transformation upon being consecrated to sisterhood, had been unsexed, degendered, unwomaned—an opinion that spawned a related debate: whether that transformation occurred immediately or over time. A few of us, perhaps the proto-post-gender acolytes, argued they were special creations of God, unique beings who exuded a compressed, muscular authority, lean and mirthless, aerobicized, symphonic, designed to inculcate the Baltimore Catechism and discipline whatever impulse-imbued desire we sought to gratify with a jacketing moral responsibility. If religious instruction were tennis, the sisters played a power-baseline game. But, whatever the reason for it, we unanimously agreed that the sisters were an alien and other gender, at best, only tenuously female.
And so I would have blithely continued indentured to this idea had I not one day been sent on an errand to the sisters’ convent, an ominous building to our young imaginations, an impenetrable abyss of unlit mystery. Still, I considered it an honor to be chosen for this mission, a testament, so I thought, to my flawless performance as an altar boy and charter member of the Knights of the Altar. I knocked on the door and explained to the answering Sister Norita that I had been sent by Sister Mary Joseph to fetch her reading glasses. Sister Norita ushered me into the foyer and told me to wait. I watched her departing figure until she disappeared down the shadowed hallway and then, beset by curiosity, took a few steps forward and glanced to my left into what was obviously a living room.
Now, I suppose I expected something approaching a monastic cell, a spartanly furnished room, devoid of personality, lit by rows of votive candles and featuring crucifixes hanging on the otherwise bare walls. I was surprised, therefore, at how strikingly ordinary it seemed: bright white walls with pictures of The Sacred Heart, The Good Shepherd, and the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the head of a serpent; a couch and several arms chairs; swagged drapes and valances; an end table upon which lay a crucifix, a missal, several hymn books, and a coffee cup; a cabinet stereo, some potted plants; and a card table upon which rested a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. With a minor change here and there and the addition of a television set, it could have been the living room in any of my friends’ houses. It could have been the living room in my house—with one neoned exception.
Sitting on an ottoman was Sister Bernadette, one of the younger nuns, combing through obviously just-washed chestnut-brown hair that reached more than halfway down her back. That hair: it was clean and good. It shone. She combed deliberately, unhurriedly. I stood transfixed. There was no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, about Sister Bernadette’s gender. And as I gazed at her, as I regarded her, as I considered her in that simple act, I suddenly realized that she, and all the sisters, were characters in their own stories, not just mine or my friends’. I imagined her, wholly, and realized that she, and all the sisters, was like my mom and all my friends’ moms. They had been young girls, lived young girl’s lives, lives with tea sets and dolls, lives with dreams and secret crushes, lives with skinned knees and silly jokes, lives with best friends and irritating brothers, lives with movies and fan magazines and diaries. Just like my mom and my friends’ moms, except that one group exchanged marriage vows, devoting their lives to their husbands and children, and one group exchanged religious vows, devoting their lives to God and His children. Two different consecrations, but the same ultimate purposes.
Sister Nortia had stolen up alongside me as I stood there. “Sister Bernadette has lovely hair, doesn’t she,” Sister Norita whispered. “Yes,” I whispered back. “It is her glorification of God,” Sister Norita said; “God has given her beautiful hair, and she takes care of it and keeps it beautiful to honor his gift to her. Do you understand?” “Yes, sister,” I replied, but I really didn’t, not then. But later, when I learned about purpose and obligation, about perspective taking and humility, about empathetic concern and commitment to something larger and more durable than myself, I understood that, however meager they may be, my gifts, like rivulets of wax cordoroying a candle, flow from the candle’s hollow only if the wick is trimmed and set aflame.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Money and Chocolate
“The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.” So said Thomas Jefferson, who perhaps had chocolate in mind when he declared that, along with life and liberty, an independent America would be dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. But, alas, Jefferson died too soon to experience the full gestalt of chocolate. Two years after his death, Dutchman Conrad van Houten was pressing the fat from the cacao bean, which led to cacao powder. By 1849 English chocolate makers were mixing in sugar, added back the cacao butter, and created a solid eating chocolate. The chocolate bar was born. In 1875 the Swiss chocolatier Daniel Paten added powdered milk to create milk chocolate, a process he sold, unwisely it would seem, to his neighbor Henri Nestle. Thus, had Jefferson lived long enough, he would undoubtedly have been the most adulatory of chocolate choristers.
Still, by Jefferson’s time, chocolate had long since spread from the three chests full of cacao beans Hernando Cortez had brought back to Spain from his New World conquistadoring, and had become the drink of choice throughout Europe and the United States. Now, Jefferson most certainly knew that consuming chocolate produced both alertness and an exquisite glow of feel-good contentment. What he did not know was why. He did not know that chocolate contained more than 300 chemical ingredients, including a host of stimulants which elbowed dozing neurotransmitters awake to powered on the brain’s reward circuit toggle switch. However, a two-part study published in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that money, indeed, just the mere sight of money, can hobble that reward circuitry and mute its mellow pleasure.
The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” sought to examine the effect of money on everyday happiness, the small scale “little good things,” according to coauthor Elizabeth Dunn. It found that the purchasing power of wealth diminished the ability to enjoy the things purchased. But here’s where things get interesting for chocolate connoisseurs everywhere. For the second portion of the study, the researchers recruited 40 participants of various ages from the University of British Columbia and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included a picture of Canadian money; the other half, a neutral picture. Before beginning the questionnaire, participants were given a small chocolate bar. Those subconsciously primed by the picture of money spent 13 seconds less eating their chocolate than those whose questionnaire contained a neutral picture. The researchers interpreted this time differential as indicating the money-primed participants savored the chocolate less and, adding this finding to the first part of the study, concluded that, because having money “giveth” one access to life’s extravagant pleasures, it “taketh away” the gratifying satisfaction of life’s smaller, more quotidian pleasures.
Quod est demonstratum: money attenuates, diminishes, dwindles, muffles, dilutes, parches, and impoverishes the wealthy’s sense of well-being. They can’t get no satisfaction. Let that be a lesson to us all. Money cannot buy happiness. Science says. Even has a term for it: “hedonic adaptation.” We get used to pleasure; its presence becomes a prelude to its absence. In the cage match between phenylethylamine—the so-called “chocolate amphetamine—and money, the chemical is apparently headed for an inevitable smackdown by Mammon.
Now, I am a fan of science. It rifts to the truth of things, what they are and how they work. But this chocolate study seems to me a cocktail frank in the buffet of science; a sciencey vuvuzela, designed for noisy fanfare rather than empirical music. It looks like science, has a kind of scienciness to it, but, really, for me, it offers about as much insight as saying that human hips evolved to operate hula hoops. In short, this study makes me dubious.
Consider, first, that the study participants were given chocolate, while in the real world people purchase chocolate. They use money to buy it, and buy it they do: In the United States, $7 billion is spent on chocolate. Americans eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, nearly 12 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Hedonic adaptation? Seems more like hedonic absorption.
Consider, second, that, extending the logic of the study, we are forced to conclude that only the most impoverished persons can truly enjoy what they purchase, a cankered thought, surely. After all, if money is an instrument to procure pleasure, and, as the study purports to show, the procurement of pleasure reduces that pleasure, then those with less money must therefore experience more pleasure because they procure less. By the same logical token, the study suggests that, to truly enjoy life’s most positive experiences, we should forego the effort to accumulate wealth, which, given the reality of human nature, is about as likely as a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat. Would anyone, anyone, refuse wealth because it would undermine their ability to savor life’s little pleasures? Besides, can it possibly be true that the wealthy are condemned to such ho-hum lives? Surely they, like anyone, take pleasure in a child’s laugh, in a gesture of friendship, in the caress of a loved one, in a day filled with sunshine and blue air and summer water, in a cardinal perched like a beating heart in the center of a treetop, in ice cream on a hot day, in heroism and loyalty and excellence in action.
Consider, third, whether a subjective response like savoring is reducible to raters with stop watches timing how long the chocolate remains in the mouth. Does not the savor of something vary with the individual and the context? I will suck on a hard candy until it is a thin wafer of barely connected molecules. My wife Kathy immediately crunches it for a burst of flavor. Do we not, each in our own way, savor the candy equally? Pinning savoriness to the second hand of a stop watch serves the quantifying purpose of the experiment, but it hardly reflects the rhythms and expressions of individual taste.
Consider, finally, that the study, while guaranteeing its publication and circulation in the cultural discourse by its tie-in to the intellectually fashionable happiness studies, actually proves little. Has it ever been doubted that any experience, once it becomes familiar, loses its glamour? Indeed, what the study does confirm, in its authors’ conclusion that wealth dilutes the capacity to savor life’s small delights, is a social jealousy that salves itself by reversing the hierarchy of privilege. Those of us not wealthy want to believe that those who are are less happy. We want to lower them in a way that elevates us. “Sure,” the authors’ interpretation permits us to say, “they may have sky boxes at the Super Bowl, may wear Kiton suits and Marc Jacob dresses, may drink Cristal Brut champagne and snack on Almas Beluga caviar, may summer in the Hamptons and vacation in Oahu, but their lives are less fulfilling, a parade of etceteras, a brochure of unmet gratifications.” Money corrodes and corrupts, the authors effectually say, telling us a tale that Fitzgerald and Dickens told, that Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” told, that St. Augustine told, that Jesus Christ told, that the prophets predating the establishment of Christendom itself told, telling us something nobody did not already know, telling us, really, not a scientific but a rather commonplace moral tale, a well-rehearsed parable, really, as the vaguely Biblical resonance of the study’s title suggests.
But most troubling to me, a chocolate acolyte of the highest order, most seriously disturbing and upsetting, is the profanation of chocolate by reducing it to empirical quantification. Such an act traduces the beatific experience of chocolate. It blasphemes chocolate, which, as anyone who eats chocolate can tell you, is proof positive that a Divine Beneficence pervades the universe. Chocolate is the anodyne for the wagging finger and shaking fist of life. Chocolate is the meme of indulgent self-reward, of you-deserve-itism, a pleasure which only the most obdurate, implacable Calvinist could deny. Chocolate is poetry, not prose. It is neural swashbuckling, cortical jubilee, limbic rapture; it is the brain’s Honilee frolic. Chocolate is the vegetable no children would leave scattered and unfinished on their plates. Chocolate gives itself over to us with such sweet and easy melt-in-your-mouth abandon, its melting point of just under 98.6 the near perfect match for the July-ed state of our own internal summer. Chocolate is the self fully mustered and standing at attention on life’s parade ground. Chocolate has its trailblazers and heroes and poets and canon of saints—Callibaut, Favarger, Hershey, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Ferrero. Chocolate resonates with graspable nowness, with the nectared instant; it is an urgent, seizing impulse that ignites the moment. Chocolate’s meaning is embodied, sacramental, undiagrammable. Chocolate is a dance under the moon; it is an unfolded petal of gladness; it is haloed felicity; it is amen and hallelujah. Chocolate is pure pleasure’s pure pleasure. Chocolate is not, cannot be, never has been nor never will be, encompassed by the numbed language of data sets in an experiment that offers a simulacrum of experience and an explanation of questionable value. Money may “taketh away” that which it “giveth.” Chocolate simply, and only, giveth.
Here’s the link to the study: http://harvard.academia.edu/JordiQuoidbach/Papers/430601/Money_giveth_money_taketh_away_The_dual_effect_of_money_on_happiness
Still, by Jefferson’s time, chocolate had long since spread from the three chests full of cacao beans Hernando Cortez had brought back to Spain from his New World conquistadoring, and had become the drink of choice throughout Europe and the United States. Now, Jefferson most certainly knew that consuming chocolate produced both alertness and an exquisite glow of feel-good contentment. What he did not know was why. He did not know that chocolate contained more than 300 chemical ingredients, including a host of stimulants which elbowed dozing neurotransmitters awake to powered on the brain’s reward circuit toggle switch. However, a two-part study published in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that money, indeed, just the mere sight of money, can hobble that reward circuitry and mute its mellow pleasure.
The study, titled “Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away: The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness,” sought to examine the effect of money on everyday happiness, the small scale “little good things,” according to coauthor Elizabeth Dunn. It found that the purchasing power of wealth diminished the ability to enjoy the things purchased. But here’s where things get interesting for chocolate connoisseurs everywhere. For the second portion of the study, the researchers recruited 40 participants of various ages from the University of British Columbia and asked them to complete a questionnaire. Half of the questionnaires included a picture of Canadian money; the other half, a neutral picture. Before beginning the questionnaire, participants were given a small chocolate bar. Those subconsciously primed by the picture of money spent 13 seconds less eating their chocolate than those whose questionnaire contained a neutral picture. The researchers interpreted this time differential as indicating the money-primed participants savored the chocolate less and, adding this finding to the first part of the study, concluded that, because having money “giveth” one access to life’s extravagant pleasures, it “taketh away” the gratifying satisfaction of life’s smaller, more quotidian pleasures.
Quod est demonstratum: money attenuates, diminishes, dwindles, muffles, dilutes, parches, and impoverishes the wealthy’s sense of well-being. They can’t get no satisfaction. Let that be a lesson to us all. Money cannot buy happiness. Science says. Even has a term for it: “hedonic adaptation.” We get used to pleasure; its presence becomes a prelude to its absence. In the cage match between phenylethylamine—the so-called “chocolate amphetamine—and money, the chemical is apparently headed for an inevitable smackdown by Mammon.
Now, I am a fan of science. It rifts to the truth of things, what they are and how they work. But this chocolate study seems to me a cocktail frank in the buffet of science; a sciencey vuvuzela, designed for noisy fanfare rather than empirical music. It looks like science, has a kind of scienciness to it, but, really, for me, it offers about as much insight as saying that human hips evolved to operate hula hoops. In short, this study makes me dubious.
Consider, first, that the study participants were given chocolate, while in the real world people purchase chocolate. They use money to buy it, and buy it they do: In the United States, $7 billion is spent on chocolate. Americans eat 2.8 billion pounds of chocolate each year, nearly 12 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Hedonic adaptation? Seems more like hedonic absorption.
Consider, second, that, extending the logic of the study, we are forced to conclude that only the most impoverished persons can truly enjoy what they purchase, a cankered thought, surely. After all, if money is an instrument to procure pleasure, and, as the study purports to show, the procurement of pleasure reduces that pleasure, then those with less money must therefore experience more pleasure because they procure less. By the same logical token, the study suggests that, to truly enjoy life’s most positive experiences, we should forego the effort to accumulate wealth, which, given the reality of human nature, is about as likely as a rabbit pulling a magician out of a hat. Would anyone, anyone, refuse wealth because it would undermine their ability to savor life’s little pleasures? Besides, can it possibly be true that the wealthy are condemned to such ho-hum lives? Surely they, like anyone, take pleasure in a child’s laugh, in a gesture of friendship, in the caress of a loved one, in a day filled with sunshine and blue air and summer water, in a cardinal perched like a beating heart in the center of a treetop, in ice cream on a hot day, in heroism and loyalty and excellence in action.
Consider, third, whether a subjective response like savoring is reducible to raters with stop watches timing how long the chocolate remains in the mouth. Does not the savor of something vary with the individual and the context? I will suck on a hard candy until it is a thin wafer of barely connected molecules. My wife Kathy immediately crunches it for a burst of flavor. Do we not, each in our own way, savor the candy equally? Pinning savoriness to the second hand of a stop watch serves the quantifying purpose of the experiment, but it hardly reflects the rhythms and expressions of individual taste.
Consider, finally, that the study, while guaranteeing its publication and circulation in the cultural discourse by its tie-in to the intellectually fashionable happiness studies, actually proves little. Has it ever been doubted that any experience, once it becomes familiar, loses its glamour? Indeed, what the study does confirm, in its authors’ conclusion that wealth dilutes the capacity to savor life’s small delights, is a social jealousy that salves itself by reversing the hierarchy of privilege. Those of us not wealthy want to believe that those who are are less happy. We want to lower them in a way that elevates us. “Sure,” the authors’ interpretation permits us to say, “they may have sky boxes at the Super Bowl, may wear Kiton suits and Marc Jacob dresses, may drink Cristal Brut champagne and snack on Almas Beluga caviar, may summer in the Hamptons and vacation in Oahu, but their lives are less fulfilling, a parade of etceteras, a brochure of unmet gratifications.” Money corrodes and corrupts, the authors effectually say, telling us a tale that Fitzgerald and Dickens told, that Chaucer’s “The Friar’s Tale” and “The Pardoner’s Tale” told, that St. Augustine told, that Jesus Christ told, that the prophets predating the establishment of Christendom itself told, telling us something nobody did not already know, telling us, really, not a scientific but a rather commonplace moral tale, a well-rehearsed parable, really, as the vaguely Biblical resonance of the study’s title suggests.
But most troubling to me, a chocolate acolyte of the highest order, most seriously disturbing and upsetting, is the profanation of chocolate by reducing it to empirical quantification. Such an act traduces the beatific experience of chocolate. It blasphemes chocolate, which, as anyone who eats chocolate can tell you, is proof positive that a Divine Beneficence pervades the universe. Chocolate is the anodyne for the wagging finger and shaking fist of life. Chocolate is the meme of indulgent self-reward, of you-deserve-itism, a pleasure which only the most obdurate, implacable Calvinist could deny. Chocolate is poetry, not prose. It is neural swashbuckling, cortical jubilee, limbic rapture; it is the brain’s Honilee frolic. Chocolate is the vegetable no children would leave scattered and unfinished on their plates. Chocolate gives itself over to us with such sweet and easy melt-in-your-mouth abandon, its melting point of just under 98.6 the near perfect match for the July-ed state of our own internal summer. Chocolate is the self fully mustered and standing at attention on life’s parade ground. Chocolate has its trailblazers and heroes and poets and canon of saints—Callibaut, Favarger, Hershey, Lindt, Ghirardelli, Ferrero. Chocolate resonates with graspable nowness, with the nectared instant; it is an urgent, seizing impulse that ignites the moment. Chocolate’s meaning is embodied, sacramental, undiagrammable. Chocolate is a dance under the moon; it is an unfolded petal of gladness; it is haloed felicity; it is amen and hallelujah. Chocolate is pure pleasure’s pure pleasure. Chocolate is not, cannot be, never has been nor never will be, encompassed by the numbed language of data sets in an experiment that offers a simulacrum of experience and an explanation of questionable value. Money may “taketh away” that which it “giveth.” Chocolate simply, and only, giveth.
Here’s the link to the study: http://harvard.academia.edu/JordiQuoidbach/Papers/430601/Money_giveth_money_taketh_away_The_dual_effect_of_money_on_happiness
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Absent-Minded Professor
It would seem, judging by topic of the stories with which my wife Kathy regaled family and friends over the Easter holiday, that I have become a stereotype. In particular, the absentminded professor. While it is true that I am a professor, and while it is equally true that I have moments of, uh, attentional elsewhereness, I had never placed those two facts together into an equation that yielded the answer “absentminded professor.” Well, given the misadventures in cognitive waywardness that Kathy so artfully brochured, that answer has become blindingly obvious. No longer could I casually dismiss my lapses with such benign phrases as “zoning out” or “drawing a blank.” No longer could I claim that I was beset with weighty thoughts or, should that prove ineffectual, as it usually did, take the opposite tack and say that, like a Zen master, I was practicing a consciousness-rinsing detachment. Were Kathy’s stories biblical, I would have been forced to concede their inerrancy. I was an absentminded professor.
Sure, I have long recognized my propensity for a kind of mental truancy—stepping into the shower with my glasses on; neglecting to add detergent when doing laundry or turning on the dryer without setting the heat; losing track of the day of the week and entering a classroom stunned to find no students present; forgetting to put on socks; putting some baby carrots in the filter basket of the Mr. Coffee machine; gazing off at some architectural feature in a room during meetings and being elbowed by the person next to me because I had not heard a question directed to me, carefully packing my warm winter mittens with their thinsulate liners in a shoebox so I could easily access them the following winter, only to forget where I had placed the box; forgetting my wedding anniversary and my granddaughter’s birthday despite writing the dates down in my appointment book, because I had somehow misplaced my appointment book. The boxed gloves and the appointment book have yet to be located. I’d be willing to wager that 3M need not go global: the copious pads of memory-aiding Post-It Notes I purchase—copious because they disappear with such mysterious regularity—would undoubtedly keep its domestic profits charts trending near vertically upward.
This all had seemed harmless enough. I paid little attention to my inattentiveness. Surely such eclipses of attention were common, and when I did think about them, I secretly harbored the notion that my particular moments of mental unmustering glittered with the luster of winning charm. But the events Kathy narrated, though told with loving jocularity, deglittered that lustrous bit of self-aggrandizement, made me attend my inattention, and sent me headlong into a bruising realization: I was a stereotype.
Story #1: Many years ago, early in our marriage, in those glorious days of pre-cell phone yesteryear, Kathy, out of town at a meeting, called home via a long-distance collect call. Here’s the transcript:
Operator: I have a collect call for Jerry DeNuccio from Kathy.
Me: Kathy who?
Kathy (in the background): Kathy your wife!
Me: Oh. Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call.
Kathy: Kathy who? What were you thinking?
Me (who wasn’t thinking and should have admitted it): Well, I know a couple of women named Kathy.
Kathy: And who might those other women be?
Clearly, I had entered treacherous terrain. Unlike the Red Queen, I could run, mentally anyway, as fast as I was able and I would still lose ground. Only one sensible option remained. I sent up a white flag and quit the field: “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #2: Kathy called home one morning and asked me to take an apple-cinnamon braid from the freezer, put it on a baking sheet, and let it sit out on the counter so it could rise. The braid was intended for an office party the next day. I did as I was instructed, except I did not take the braid out of the box. Needless to say, it rose only enough to fill the box with a gluey, amorphous blob that would undoubtedly sent Steve McQueen screaming from the room. When she asked how I could be so thoughtless, I replied, “Well, you didn’t tell me to take it out of the box.” “Jerry,” she said, “every week you make two loaves of whole wheat bread from scratch. You obviously understand that yeast products rise when they warm, right?” “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #3: This past winter I woke up about 1:30am, not untypical for me, and, while making coffee, noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. Kathy is very particular about locking that door before she goes to bed, and thinking she had forgotten, I locked it. I then worked out on the treadmill for an hour and hit the shower. As I was toweling off, I heard a thump against the bathroom window. I ignored it, thinking it was probably a bird somehow trapped under the awning and frantically flying about to escape. Two more thumps, more insistent than the first, followed. It suddenly dawned on me that the thumper was Kathy. I knew she was working late, but I thought I had seen her in bed when I got up. She had worked all night and well into early morning, arrived home at 3:00 wanting nothing more than to slip into a warm bed, and I had locked her out. She had called my cell phone and the landline, but being in the shower I hadn’t heard them ringing. Seeing lights on, she knew I was up, and began to fear that I had fallen down the stairs and was lying broken-boned at the bottom, unable to answer her phone calls. Wading through snow a foot deep, circling the house to peer in windows, she saw the bathroom light, heard the shower, knew I wasn’t heaped helplessly on the floor, and thumped.
I raised the window. “Kathy, is that you?” Her reply was icier than the night air: “Will you please unlock the door?” Once inside, her tone became decidedly hotter—so hot, I backed away, fearing I would be blistered by it. Why did I lock the door? I thought you forgot to. How could I think that? I thought you were in bed. Didn’t I remember she’d called to say she’d be late? I didn’t think you’d be working until 3am. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I didn’t hear it. On it went: she third-degreeing my actions and lack thereof, me defending them, stoutly, growing a bit angry myself, until, with a strobe-lit intensity, I suddenly imagined her, bone-tired, cold, beset by fear for my well being, and I knew I had done a stupid thing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did a stupid thing. Really stupid. I’m sorry.” And she forgave me.
Calculating the sum of these three stories, factoring in the other incidents of mental driftiness, and reflecting on the total, I now see with unbanishable clarity that I am hewn from the stereotype stock made famous by Fred MacMurray’s Professor Brainard in the 1961 Disney movie, The Absent-Minded Professor. Brainard, a chemistry professor, forgets his own wedding, several times. I suspect on the night she was locked out Kathy would not have minded had I done the same. Still, Brainard has one saving grade: he invents flubber. Me? I simply am a flubber. And that is a self-recognition about as welcome as a severely abraded elbow. To redeem myself from space cadetery, I needed to deflub myself. I therefore made a mental note to purchase, the next day, first thing, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind. Perhaps I should have written that mental note down.
Sure, I have long recognized my propensity for a kind of mental truancy—stepping into the shower with my glasses on; neglecting to add detergent when doing laundry or turning on the dryer without setting the heat; losing track of the day of the week and entering a classroom stunned to find no students present; forgetting to put on socks; putting some baby carrots in the filter basket of the Mr. Coffee machine; gazing off at some architectural feature in a room during meetings and being elbowed by the person next to me because I had not heard a question directed to me, carefully packing my warm winter mittens with their thinsulate liners in a shoebox so I could easily access them the following winter, only to forget where I had placed the box; forgetting my wedding anniversary and my granddaughter’s birthday despite writing the dates down in my appointment book, because I had somehow misplaced my appointment book. The boxed gloves and the appointment book have yet to be located. I’d be willing to wager that 3M need not go global: the copious pads of memory-aiding Post-It Notes I purchase—copious because they disappear with such mysterious regularity—would undoubtedly keep its domestic profits charts trending near vertically upward.
This all had seemed harmless enough. I paid little attention to my inattentiveness. Surely such eclipses of attention were common, and when I did think about them, I secretly harbored the notion that my particular moments of mental unmustering glittered with the luster of winning charm. But the events Kathy narrated, though told with loving jocularity, deglittered that lustrous bit of self-aggrandizement, made me attend my inattention, and sent me headlong into a bruising realization: I was a stereotype.
Story #1: Many years ago, early in our marriage, in those glorious days of pre-cell phone yesteryear, Kathy, out of town at a meeting, called home via a long-distance collect call. Here’s the transcript:
Operator: I have a collect call for Jerry DeNuccio from Kathy.
Me: Kathy who?
Kathy (in the background): Kathy your wife!
Me: Oh. Yes, operator, I’ll accept the call.
Kathy: Kathy who? What were you thinking?
Me (who wasn’t thinking and should have admitted it): Well, I know a couple of women named Kathy.
Kathy: And who might those other women be?
Clearly, I had entered treacherous terrain. Unlike the Red Queen, I could run, mentally anyway, as fast as I was able and I would still lose ground. Only one sensible option remained. I sent up a white flag and quit the field: “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #2: Kathy called home one morning and asked me to take an apple-cinnamon braid from the freezer, put it on a baking sheet, and let it sit out on the counter so it could rise. The braid was intended for an office party the next day. I did as I was instructed, except I did not take the braid out of the box. Needless to say, it rose only enough to fill the box with a gluey, amorphous blob that would undoubtedly sent Steve McQueen screaming from the room. When she asked how I could be so thoughtless, I replied, “Well, you didn’t tell me to take it out of the box.” “Jerry,” she said, “every week you make two loaves of whole wheat bread from scratch. You obviously understand that yeast products rise when they warm, right?” “Sorry,” I said; “I was stupid.”
Story #3: This past winter I woke up about 1:30am, not untypical for me, and, while making coffee, noticed that the back door was slightly ajar. Kathy is very particular about locking that door before she goes to bed, and thinking she had forgotten, I locked it. I then worked out on the treadmill for an hour and hit the shower. As I was toweling off, I heard a thump against the bathroom window. I ignored it, thinking it was probably a bird somehow trapped under the awning and frantically flying about to escape. Two more thumps, more insistent than the first, followed. It suddenly dawned on me that the thumper was Kathy. I knew she was working late, but I thought I had seen her in bed when I got up. She had worked all night and well into early morning, arrived home at 3:00 wanting nothing more than to slip into a warm bed, and I had locked her out. She had called my cell phone and the landline, but being in the shower I hadn’t heard them ringing. Seeing lights on, she knew I was up, and began to fear that I had fallen down the stairs and was lying broken-boned at the bottom, unable to answer her phone calls. Wading through snow a foot deep, circling the house to peer in windows, she saw the bathroom light, heard the shower, knew I wasn’t heaped helplessly on the floor, and thumped.
I raised the window. “Kathy, is that you?” Her reply was icier than the night air: “Will you please unlock the door?” Once inside, her tone became decidedly hotter—so hot, I backed away, fearing I would be blistered by it. Why did I lock the door? I thought you forgot to. How could I think that? I thought you were in bed. Didn’t I remember she’d called to say she’d be late? I didn’t think you’d be working until 3am. Why didn’t I answer the phone? I didn’t hear it. On it went: she third-degreeing my actions and lack thereof, me defending them, stoutly, growing a bit angry myself, until, with a strobe-lit intensity, I suddenly imagined her, bone-tired, cold, beset by fear for my well being, and I knew I had done a stupid thing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did a stupid thing. Really stupid. I’m sorry.” And she forgave me.
Calculating the sum of these three stories, factoring in the other incidents of mental driftiness, and reflecting on the total, I now see with unbanishable clarity that I am hewn from the stereotype stock made famous by Fred MacMurray’s Professor Brainard in the 1961 Disney movie, The Absent-Minded Professor. Brainard, a chemistry professor, forgets his own wedding, several times. I suspect on the night she was locked out Kathy would not have minded had I done the same. Still, Brainard has one saving grade: he invents flubber. Me? I simply am a flubber. And that is a self-recognition about as welcome as a severely abraded elbow. To redeem myself from space cadetery, I needed to deflub myself. I therefore made a mental note to purchase, the next day, first thing, Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Unfortunately, it slipped my mind. Perhaps I should have written that mental note down.
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