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.

 

 

Mashed Potatoes

I read recently that 7-Eleven Stores in Europe and Asia, and a few in the United States, are featuring machines that dispense mashed potatoes.  The machine mixes instant mashed potato powder with water and oozes it out steaming hot, complete with gravy.  Now, this is a market-based theology before whose god I cannot genuflect.  It is a concept of mashed potatoes wholly different from mine—an order of magnitude and tastitude different.  To me, machine-spurted mashed potatoes are not just a departure from the aesthetics of food consumption, it is an excommunication of it, a refusal even to grant it recognition.  After all, how can mechanically squirted mashed potatoes make any demand for one’s gustatory attention?  Simply calling them mashed potatoes constitutes a linguistic felony.  I like mashed potatoes, made-from-scratch mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes with textured particularity, mashed potatoes freighted with flavor and savor—mashed potatoes, in other words, made the way my father-in-law Tom made them.

At all family gatherings involving a main meal, Tom was called upon to perform what we called “the ceremony,” that ritualistic, almost shamanic process by which he turned a bowl of boiled and skinned potatoes into a side-dish so unsurpassingly delectable that only waving pennants and the blare of silver trumpets would have been fit to announce their arrival on the table.  Eating them was to enter and stroll the midway of an endorphin carnival.

Tom was a talkative, good-natured man, but when he performed the ceremony, he entered a cocoon of silence, his smile vanished, and seriousness settled in his eyes. His every action was resolute, practiced, distilled to its most precise and efficient motion.  Through his hands flowed an accumulated knowledge, the past and present intersecting, colluding.  He never said a word, but he communicated, each gesture a testimony to the significance of concentrated and patient effort, each action a small poem about the human capacity for craft and being wholly held in its experience.   And the result was mashed potatoes, but something more, something additional and beyond potatoes, something no machine, no matter how sophisticated, could possibly deliver.

Where, I wonder, did time go that instant mashed potatoes were no longer fast or convenient enough?  What looking-glass world did I step into where what happens hastens with barely a hiss of resistant air parting, then closing behind?  When did a-fishing in the stream of time become living in it?  I am sometimes accused of being anti-modern, but the truth is I am ambivalently modern.  I have read that the University of Southern California has received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to develop a video game based on Thoreau’s Walden—a massive irony considering that Thoreau essentially flipped off the two technological marvels of his time, the train and the telegraph.

I have read that the BBC has partnered with Legacy Games to create a Facebook game based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the purpose being to reunite the separated Darcy and Elizabeth while immersing players in scenes from Austen’s novels.  Indeed, Austen has been thoroughly repurposed and mashed up: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a YouTube video “Jane Austen’s Fight Club,” even an action figure.  Tolstoy, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Defoe, Kafka, Kerouac, and Charlotte Bronte have also gotten the mashup treatment.

Should I jeer or cheer?  Feel saddened that, as the French poet Paul Valery says, we no longer work “at what cannot be abbreviated,” or gladdened that it in some sense these minor imaginations validate major ones?  Well, it is the way of things.  Best to muster oneself, I suppose, to be like Walt Whitman, large enough to be at least on civil terms with the antonymed rhythm, the dialectic energies, of how the world goes.

But even in this hither-and-thither world, this coiled and convulsed rush of a world, among its glens and coves and hollows, small, soft-cymballed revelations occur if we are attentive enough to recognize them.  Tom rendered one at every family gathering.  Working with potatoes, milk, butter, salt, a few herbs and spices—elemental and unreverenced materials—Tom performed a sleight of hand in plain sight, affirming the ordinary, conjuring a small epiphany of the mundane. Tom transfigured lumps of tubers, humble members of the nightshade family, into mashed potatoes that lingered in the mouth and blessed the taste buds, mashed potatoes so good, so genuinely good, it approached impiety to even consider topping them with gravy.

Manifesto

I have a wish for New Year 2013.  It is a wish, which means it is a hope, which means it has the substance of things rarely seen.  It could be nothing more than a wish upon a star.  Perhaps it is a prayer without a prayer.  It is surely an ideal, but, then, why are we given to imagining ideals if we cannot at least begin to or at least partially fulfill them?  I believe it is in our nature not to hand-wring, but, rather, to make claims upon the world about how things ought to be.

My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives six definitions of “new.”  Here is the definition I do not wish for 2013: “beginning as the resumption or repetition of a previous act or thing (a “new” day).”  Such a definition leaves the before, the as-it-has-been, the yesterdayed, untroubled.  It denotes merely a new number, the tic of the annual odometer, while we continue to settle for too little, to yield ourselves to the embrace of the way-it-was, which, by habit, becomes the ever-shall-be.  Such a definition mocks the winged promise of newness; it contravenes the wished-for, the expectation-imbued.  Such a definition means we occupy time without being much occupied about it.

Here are the definitions I wish for the new year: “having existed or having been made but a short time: recent;” “recently manifested, recognized, or experienced: novel or unfamiliar;” “unaccustomed;” “refreshed, regenerated;” “different from one of the same that has existed previously.”  These definitions disturb the what-has-been, the erstwhile, with the otherwise, the fresh, the different.  They suggest that the prior can be made prismatic, the previous a preface, the antecedent an alchemy of moments.  Nothing is permanent, says Emerson, but life in transition, powered by “the energizing spirit.”

I wish for a new year of moments in which we are seized by such a spirit and taken beyond the profanation of languid and dreamless drift, beyond ossified discourse and strategic calculation and ironic detachment, taken beyond our sidewise indifference and default disdain, beyond our shadowed nooks and crannies, beyond the defensive perimeter we deploy to garrison enshrined ideas and manicured pieties and soothing ideologies. I wish for us to be taken by awe, by love, by compassion, by moral imagination, by anything real and adrenalizing and outward-reaching—and I wish for us to make our lives a narrative of that captivity.  I wish for a new year in which we engage the could-be, the there-is-more, the this-is-not-the-way-it-has-to-be.

I hope our new year deepens the familiar and pushes it to the verge of enchantment.  I hope our new year galvanizes our imagination, turbocharges it into spacious regard and makes each of us, as Henry James said, “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”  Let’s practice, until it becomes second nature, wondering and marveling that this improbable planet, just now beginning its improbable tilt toward spring, still whirls its improbable pilgrimage around the sun.  And what a planet it is!  Madly impenetrable?  Gladly inadvertent?  It demands, even if it does not always reward, our full-gazed regard. 

Best wishes for 2013: I hope it gives us nothing we think you want, and everything we know we need.

Tap

Shortly after I formally announced to the Human Resources and Academic Affairs offices my intention to retire at the end of the current academic year, or, more precisely, within an hour and a half—the rumors in the mill a small university churn with a velocity rivaling the speed of elementary particles in the Large Hadron Collider—folks began to drop by my office or stop me between classes to ask what I’d be doing once I had shuffled off this mortal coil of full-time teaching.  Wanting to be witty and avoid the usual responses—yard work, woodworking, some golf, travel, rereading  Middlemarch—I replied, “I’m going to take up tap dancing.”   I had never considered learning tap.  I simply wanted to be clever and get a reaction, and it just popped into my mind.   But here’s the thing: the more I said “I’m going to take up tap dancing,” the more I actually wanted to do it.

How tap dancing managed to buck and wing its way into my mind I don’t know.  Perhaps I had been subliminally conditioned by the animated film Happy Feet, which I had watched with my youngest granddaughter on DVD.  Perhaps a deeply-lodged memory pod burst to the surface, the one of me watching, spellbound, Bill Robinson and Gregory and Maurice Hines and Savion Glover make moves that outraged probability.   Perhaps it was nostalgia: over the years I have, for one reason or another, remembered when I was a kid purchasing taps, nailing them to the heels of my shoes, and taking great satisfaction in “that clinking, clanking sound” as I strode the sidewalks and school hallways.  Or maybe it was the Italian loafers I once purchased at a shoe discounter, shoes whose heels produced a resonant ring on hard surfaces and prodded me into my best version of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever strut.  Whatever the reason, and despite a periodically flaring case of sciatica in my right leg, the more I thought about learning to tap dance, the more it seemed a good thing to do, even a necessary thing to do.

At the very least, I found myself wanting to learn the basic moves--the brush and shuffles (side, back, straight) and  flap and wing and heel-step and step-heel—and how to combine them.  I wanted to transform motion to sound, to rhythmic patterns and precisely timed beats.  I wanted to do something that, as Hawthorne says in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” has no purpose but “purposes of grace.”  I wanted to make music with my feet.

Everything has its music, so why not such humble appendages as the feet?   Everything is entuned and melodied; everything has its pitch and timbre, its progression and harmony, its duration and anticipation.  Smiles, tragedies, sport, gardens, well-tuned engines, a well-chosen word, ritual, money, snowstorms, quantum mechanics, the blue endlessness of August afternoons, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, the drumming fingers of a clerk as I write a check, the brush cymballed stir of conversing voices, coves and glades, the systole and diastole of the heart—everything has its music, everything allegro or adagio, everything the grandeur of a symphony or the intimacy of chamber music , everything the improvisational play of jazz, the jagged-edge of blues, the driving 4/4 beat of rock ‘n roll, the more languid ¾ meter of waltz.   And people—they have their music, too.  In his novel Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie mentions a guitar chord especially for Indians, a chord only they can play.  I think we all, every one of us, has a chord that, when strummed, announces us, sculpts us in sound, reveals us in a form far truer than the faces we keep in a jar by the door.

Tap dancing.  It seemed a good and necessary thing to do.   I wanted to yield myself to it; wanted to cast myself into the sheer exuberance of it; wanted the kinetic physicality of it; the enwinged corporeality of it; the unclamped, unthrottled, uncoiled experience of it.    I wanted its nerve-ending buzz, its blood-coursing jangle, its free-radical turbocharge, its seemingly frictionless movement, its disdain for the heavy weight of gravity.  I’m not sure why.  An age thing, likely, a beat I was not ready to dance to.  What I do know for certain is that, because tap dancing seems all dazzle and spontaneity, all syncopated and joyful noise, all pistoning feet and a radiant smile, all so happily immediate and inadvertent, so time-stoppingly beautifu, we forget the engineering involved, the close and calibrated planning, the hours of sweat-drenched practice, the cell-deep fatigue.  It is art hiding itself.   It is  cool.  And isn’t that, finally and ultimately, what all philosophy, from whatever age and culture, calls us to be?

 Cool.

 

Being Thankful

The other morning I watched the sunlight bayonet through the remaining leaves of the backyard elm, brilliant blades of light, whitely radiant, and somehow, for some reason, I remembered that old monastic phrase, “vacare deo,” emptying oneself for God.  I wanted to empty myself for that light.  I wanted it to pierce me.  I wanted to be a pane of glass through which it passed.  I was thankful for that light.

*     *     *

A student offered this evaluation of a literature class he had taken from me: “I did not like this class.  I had to work too hard.”  I was thankful for that student’s comment.

*     *     *

When the pain comes from the pinched sciatic nerve, when that tasering jolt of hurt spasms in my lumbar and travels, clamoring and saw-tooth-edged, down my right leg to gather around ankle and shin, I am pestled  into writhing, tears-in-the-eyes, moan-out-loud immobility.  Like Job, I am “smote,” want “to let the day perish wherein I was born,” feel the arrows of the Almighty within me,” “speak in anguish,” feel a “burden to myself.”

But when that moment comes when the pain, just a little, barely perceptibly, loosens its hold, when its tide ebbs, when the promise of its surcease, when the redemption from its blowtorching agony, begins, if I can steel myself and hold on, only hold on, I am thankful.

*     *     *

Like some confectionery conciliator, I bring together in sweet concord, in surgared harmony, in candied peace, the rival houses of Mars and Hershey.  No doubt Poe is right: ours “is a world of sweets and sours.” And given that the sours all too often outnumber the sweets, I am thankful, in equal measure, for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and for M&Ms, in all the original’s subsequent mouth-not-hands-melting incarnations, except coconut.

*     *     *

The kitchen faucet, which I installed about 10 years ago, was leaking from beneath the bonnet covering the hot water cartridge.  I had made this fix before—a simple matter of replacing the cartridge O-rings—and, in fact, not two weeks before, I had replaced a spring and rubber seat to stop a persistent drip.  I duly closed the shut-off valves under the sink, removed the bonnet and lock-down nut, and pulled out the cartridge.  I heard a gurgle and a rushing sound.  Suddenly, hot water geysered from the socket.  I rechecked the shut-off valve.  Closed.  I darted to the basement to close the water valve but could not budge it.  Back upstairs and a panicked call to a local plumber who, leaving his lunch behind, arrived ten minutes later, closed the water valve, reinstalled the spring and rubber seat, and replaced the worn O-rings.

To lessen my embarrassment, he assured me that the water valve was indeed very hard to turn, and that the hot water shut-off valve “was shot” and needed replacement.  The fault lay in the mechanism, not the mechanic.  Still, I was thankful for the humiliation.  We need to be abashed periodically, if only as an aileron to prevent ourselves from rolling into a self-regarding spin, if only to feel that abrading scrape of uncertainty that forces us inward, makes us take stock of our often impenetrable self-reflexivity, if only to nudge us away from being a loiterer in the order of things.  I am more thankful, however, for plumbers, especially ones willing to abridge their hard-earned lunch hour and still find the heart to attend to the fraying self-consciousness of a failed DIYer.

*     *     *

My dreams sometimes involve discovering hidden rooms in my house.  Such dreams are sometimes interpreted to mean the dreamer’s potential has yet to be realized, that the complacent, self-containing shell of the dreamer’s life needs to be breached, that some new direction needs to be travelled, some errand into the widlerness undertaken.  Such dreams symbolize our lives calling out for a greater share of us.  I am thankful for these dreams.  They tell me that, even six decades after my initial appearance on the planet, I am unfinished, unfinalized—maybe, even, unfinishable, unfinalizable.

*     *     *

I have a history, but I do not know, will probably never know, the conditions of my probability.  I am a small story, a subplot, perhaps, embedded in a much larger story whose denoeument stands veiled in mystery but whose plot is powered by the gifts of an existence and capacities I had no hand in creating.  They were bestowed.  How, or by whom, I do not know.  As David Bentley Hart notes, “What lies most deeply within us also comes from impossibly far beyond us.”  And though I do not know to whom, to what, for that I am profoundly thankful.

Leaves, and All

Looking out the kitchen window this morning,  I notice that the backyard is carpeted with leaves—carpet bombed, actually, leaf-assaulted, for it was clear the day before.  And I find myself feeling a pleasant anticipation.  I cannot wait to begin raking them up.

I’m not sure why, exactly. 

Sure, there’s the exercise of it, the simplicity of rake and arms, the technology of tool and muscle, briskly applied, haloed in the pale-gold light of an autumn afternoon.  And there is the sight of my shadow, now cast forward, now behind, always connected, and me wondering whimsically, who is the me.  And there is the coming, the unannounced, unaccountable coming, of thoughts, urged perhaps by the rhythm of repetitive motion, re-emerging from the deep recess into which they had silently slipped. And as much as I like watching the tumult of leaves falling, the abandon of it, the mad whirl and drift and tumble of it, the air-skidding intoxicated somersaultedness of it, I relish the neatening raking involves, the restoration, the feeling of satisfaction in looking back when done and seeing the visible change I have made.  But there’s more to it than that.

Each of those leaves is a tongue; my backyard speaks in tongues.  Each of those leaves is a calling card, a keyboard key, a communique of blades and petioles and veins and midribs and waxy cuticles and stipules.  Each of those leaves, scissoring itself at its axil, casting itself adrift, tells how long long enough is.  Each of those leaves is the tree’s self-wounding, an absence in the now making way for a presence to come, a leaving that makes way for an arrival.  Each of those leaves is a sign of transformation, the trees’ summery green chatter turned autumn’s red-yellow-bronze-brown solemn expression turned acrid-woody incense slipstreaming from the thurible of the fire pit.

But more than those things, even, is this: ceasing for a moment, standing still, I will imagine I can feel, slightly but perceptibly, the earth tilting away from the sun, and then I will resume, bending back into the work, lost in the sheer embodiment of it, the feltness of its physical motion, the being in the doing.

Raking the leaves.  It is, for reasons I can enumerate and rank but cannot definitively connect or comprehend, the very thing that, at this particular time, I find it necessary to do.  It is the customized piece for some jigsaw-puzzled need.  What that need is, I cannot with confidence say.  But, then, perhaps not to understand is to understand that which is necessary, that which is true.