The Quicker Picker-Upper

Since its first television commercial in 1967, Procter & Gamble’s Bounty Paper Towels have claimed to be the “quicker picker upper.”  P&G is wrong. 

I am the quicker picker upper. 

Now, honesty compels me to point out that the most recent ads assert that Bounty Paper Towels are the “thicker, quilted, quicker picker upper,” and I can make no pretension to being either thicker or quilted.  Still, I am the quicker picker upper.  I ply my picker upperism relentlessly in my classrooms.  Not the smallest chad from the edge of a page torn from a student’s spiral binder flutters to the floor before I have tweezed it between thumb and forefinger and deposited in the waste can.  Not the most forlorn penny lying on a classroom floor escapes my apprehension (provided, of course, that it is heads up), not a wadded gum or candy bar wrapper, not a drained plastic bottle or can of some beverage or other (AMP, Red Bull and Five Hour Energy are popular), not a well-chewed pencil, not a tracked in leaf, no detritus or debris or rubbish of any kind eludes my seizure.  

My penchant for picker uppery extends to my office as well, but it is at home that it unfolds its wings most (in)gloriously. Active grandchildren and their friends tornado through the house, pillaging pantry and cupboard, ransacking the refrigerator, and having descended like raiding Visigoths, leave in their wake juice cartons and Dorito chips and Gatorade bottles and half-eaten apples and stray shoes and strewn socks and discarded and abandoned-in-place items of clothing and bottle caps that missed their waste-basket mark and scattered magazines, books, plates, silverware, glasses, food particles of various sizes and states of freshness, and sundry other riff-raff and rejectamenta, the unstowed, the unstored, the unput-away.  I pluck and gather, pince and forcep. St. Peter was a fisher of men; I am a fisher of the spread and shed, the dropped and slopped, the cast off, cast down, cast away.  By vocation, I am a member of the literati; by avocation, it seems, I am a conscript in the brigade of litterati.

This picker uppish passion is undoubtedly connected to my propensity to neaten, order, and arrange.  My colleagues have commented more than once upon the trim organization of my desk.  My wife Kathy has commented more than once, in decidedly dubious terms, about my habit of stacking coins on my dresser: quarters, dimes, and nickles, each sprucely columned, pennies in a cleaned-out candle jar.  The American literature section on my bookshelf is aligned historically, from the Puritans to Alexie, Robinson, and Morrison.  I prepare lunch at the same time I make breakfast because I eat the same thing at both:  proteinized and fiberized oatmeal topped with the contents of three packets of Truvia and a dollop of blackberry jam.  For dinner I rotate through the same three meals. Every morning I treadmill for exactly 60 minutes at precisely 2.8 miles per hour, increasing the gradient every ten minutes. Every morning I make the bed, pestering the sheets and blanket into unwrinkled compliance.  I chronically straighten throw rugs, return chairs to their prim position under the table, and wash dishes.  Undoubtedly, to the casual onlooker, my symmetry would seem fearful, indeed.  Were cleanliness really next to godliness, I would be well on my way to canonization.

My disposition to fix, place, align, and configure is a lonely office, but, strange to say, Mr. Clean is not my hero (he’s always seemed distinctly piratical to me), I do not haunt the cleaning products aisles, nor am I some puritanical greenie who considers the use of more than five sheets of toilet paper an ethical violation of the highest order.  How, then, did I acquire this disposition to dispose so systematically?  I don’t believe it was my upbringing.  Mom was a dutiful housekeeper, but she did not aspire to pristine, Ladies Home Journaled dustlessness.  Dad had a fastidious side, but, typical of his generation, only about his tools, his lawn, and his vehicles.  I share his tool care and cleaning pickiness, but my lawn languishes and my mud-splashed, bug-splattered truck goes unwashed.

I present none of the symptoms or allied behaviors of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: I experience no panic attacks or stress, am not continually beset by thoughts of neatening, am able to function socially and occupationally, exhibit no hair pulling or Tourett’s disorder or anorexia or depression or, to the best of my knowledge, brain chemical imbalances.  Nor, I am certain, do I suffer from an anal retentive personality:  Mom told me I was a “breeze” to toilet train, and she and Dad heaped praise upon me when, as Dad put it, I “did my business.”  It is unlikely that one of the six innate, universal moral principles theorized by Jonathan Haidt—purity/degradation—is particularly pronounced in me, and that my picker upperosity is an effort to avoid contamination and elevate myself to a nobler, more exalted level.  In fact, I’ve always found the fussy rectitude of Thoreau’s assertion that our carnal lives are a “disgrace” and a “cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which [we] are allied” a pulpiteering exercise in Calvinistic self-renunciation, too much along the lines of the Puritan minister Edward Taylor calling himself a “varnished pot of putrid excrements.”  Charming!  So much for the tanginess of experience.

So, if my picker upperist and neatest predilections are instilled by neither external nor internal influences, if they are not compensatory gestures to overcome what Abraham Maslow calls “deficiency needs,”  how, then, were they kindled?  Why their impulsive blossom?  I am tempted to ascribe them to the poet Robert Southey’s description of order as “the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state;” however, I think that lofty sentiment both overstates and understates my habits.  I pick up and neaten because they are convenient and self-satisfying activities.  They save time, they save effort, and they are pleasing.  Why do I stack coins?  So I can quickly grab the amount I want to take with me on that particular day.  Why do I eat oatmeal for breakfast and lunch?  Because it’s nutritious, filling, and, most importantly, I like it.  Why do I treadmill every morning?  Because it makes me feel good, and it affords me an opportunity to read.  Why do I prepare the lunch oatmeal at breakfast?  Because I come home for lunch and am pressed for time.  Why is my bookshelf’s American literature section arranged historically?  Because I consult it often and it makes finding the text I want easier.  Why do I pick up and neaten?  Because it feels right, feels good, that the spaces I move in most frequently balance comfort and safety and hygiene and presentability.  Do I care if it all seems abnormal?  Not at all, for as Laura Kipnis says, “the concept of normalcy . . .is one of the more powerful social management tools devised to date.”  Is it possible that my picker uppery and neatenry are forms of sidling up to the border of nonconformism, acts of stealth rebellion?

Still, I am no stalwart Leonides defending the Thermopylaen pass of inflexible routine.  As it happens, I agree wholeheartedly, wholesouledly, with novelist Tom Robbins: “True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”   I know that only as things are unsettled, only as commotion convulses and welter whirls, only as answers play hide and seek with questions, does creativity stir.  I seek balance.  I make room for novelties, try the untried, experiment, sometime vary simply for the purpose of varying—though I worry that this, too, has become part of my routine.

The Quiet Man

 

I am a fan of the CBS crime drama Person of Interest.  

While the two lead characters, Michael Emerson (formerly of Lost) as Harold Finch and Jim Caviezel (who has played two divinities, Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Bobby Jones in Stroke of Genius)as John Reese, are superb actors, the show does not break new ground with their pairing.  Finch, a wealthy and reclusive computer genius—stiff, formal, and hobbled by a limp—and John Reese, an  improvisational former Green Beret and ex-CIA field officer, are polar opposites, the kind of characters that populate any number of TV series.   

I do find the premise of the show an interesting ethical tangle.  Post 9-11, at the government’s behest, Finch created a machine that keeps everyone, everywhere and at all times, under surveillance.  The machine has a unique feature: it can predict with statistical certainty “persons of interest,” persons, that is, who will either commit a crime or be the victim of one.  Though Finch considers this feature of prime importance, the government does not; so, he strikes out on his own, hiring Reese to intervene when the machine discloses the Social Security Number of a likely criminal or victim.  At the show’s heart, then, lies an ethical dilemma: the specter of omnipresent scrutiny by a machine, counterpoised by two individuals’ secret efforts to insure that justice is served.

 I can easily suppose that from a certain political perspective, the show can be seen as a wet-kiss sealed mash note to  neoliberal ideology, tarted up for acceptability with compassionate concern.  “You are being watched,” Finch intones ominously in the show’s opening voice-opener, and concludes with “We work in secret.  You’ll never find us, but . . .we’ll find you.”  If this is the case, the show would seem locked in a full-nelsoned contradiction:  the means—invading citizens’ privacy rights—are justified by the end—protecting those very citizens whose rights have been violated.  From another perspective, the show could suggest the monitoring authority of an omnipresent, omniscient and benevolent Creator.  Yet another perspective might take the show’s message as the possibility of interdicting the curved talon of fate.  I prefer to see the show as a parable for our technological age, exploring a means whereby machines remain our tools rather than we theirs.

But what I find most compelling about the show is the character of John Reese.  It is marked by quietness.  He speaks quietly, moves quietly, and when an intervention requires his martial arts skills, he deploys them with a quiet efficiency.   He is imperturbable, cool, a James Dean cool but without the disdain.  He moves about with stealthy silence, a ninja noiselessness,  entering and exiting buildings, rooms, scenes, people’s lives,  unnoticed, unradared, unsonared, quiet as a church-mouse’s shadow, as a whisper’s whisper.  John Reese is a man of action.  He is a man of quiet.

I find this all so compelling because the adjective “quiet” has often been applied to me.  The times I’ve entered the kitchen and thoroughly startled my wife Kathy are beyond counting—so beyond, it has become a private joke between us.  The first time it happened, her body spasmed, she  dropped the knife she was jellying  her toast with, and said, “God, Jerry!  I didn’t hear you coming.  You’re so quiet! Make a little noise, will you?  Clear your throat or something.  I’m going to make you wear a bell.  You almost scared me to death.”  “That was my intention,” I joked.  “Just call me Tony Perkins, and be especially wary when you’re taking a shower.”  “Very funny, Tony,” she replied, and to this very day, when I startle her, she puts a hand to her heart, laughs, and says, “you about Tonied me to death there, Mr. Perkins.”

On the plaque commemorating my winning the 2005 Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching,  I am described, in a paragraph written by my English Department colleagues, as a “quiet man who keeps a low social profile.”  Low, I hasten to add, but not disengaged.  I am not a social introvert.  I prefer to conserve my words.  I am not infatuated with the resounding peal of my own voice.  Members of committees on which I serve regularly tell me they appreciate my reluctance to engage in trifling, beside-the-point “jibber-jabber” and my speaking only to the point and only if I have something to advance the discussion.  In my literature classes I never lecture, never assume the role of “sage on the stage;” rather, I pose questions and wait, as uncomfortable as that can often be, for students to respond and weave a conversational thread.   At social gatherings I tend to listen, not just to what is said, but how it is said, its nuance and understatement, its texture and tone and grammatical shape, the felt experience it embodies or lacks, the meaning the words are given or that lies laired in the spaces between words. People tell me I’m a good listener.  In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character of Polonius may be kind or sinister, jocular or Machiavellian, but he gives his son Laertes a bit of advice I’ve taken to heart: “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.”

In this, I am my father’s son.  He confessed to me once his frustration in talking with people who were not listening but, rather, formulating a response as you spoke.  “You can see it in their eyes,” he said; “they’re inattentive because they think talk is some kind of competition.   It’s hard, but try to listen fully, right to their last word.  It’s basic respect.  Never interrupt.  Try to listen between the lines, too.”  But I think, too, my quietness has evolved from my lifelong study of literature, my pursuit of the quiet company of books and my thoughts about them—a form of conversation with their writers.  Perhaps my vocation accounts for my two favorite times of the day: the hush of predawn and the deep stillness of a midsummer midafternoon, times when I become a  chorus of one, when my restless thought syndrome settles into a pulsing hum, the yammering day takes five, and there is an “absence of insistence.”

I like to think that quiet is outgoing and social because it is receptive, mindful, hospitable, tolerant—not an outstretched arm palm up, but a hand waving in.  It fosters connections.  It draws energy from the substance of what others say.  But I also like to think that quiet is inbending and individual, drawing energy from its own resources, from the uncrowdsourced cartography of its own interior landscape, a place where the mind deliberates, the heart feels, and the soul, well, not for nothing are sacred places quiet.  As John Reese demonstrates, that quiet is kinetic, purposeful and active intervention, in the world outside ourselves, and the world within.