Taken to the Cleaners

I can be carping and critical. I’ve been that way since childhood, although I’m happy to report I’ve mellowed considerably. Occasionally, however, I notice the critical mood emerging for no reason I can see.

It happened the other day when I set out to do errands.  There was a doctor’s appointment, a stop at the fruit stand for peaches, then on to the super market for calves’ liver, an unhealthy luxury my wife and I occasionally enjoy. I stopped last at the cleaners.  

On the main road I got behind a driver, and old man, probably younger than I am, going thirty on a fifty MPH road. I muttered to myself how inconsiderate he was since the road had only two lanes. "Old geezer," I thought contemptuously.

My wife had asked me to stop at a specific stand that sold peaches, a Georgia peach of which she was fond. When I asked for them, the woman at the stand looked at me with a bored, uncomprehending expression. “Well,” I said, “my wife got a box just the other day.” She looked at me as if I were Martian.  “Idiot,” I groused to myself as I left. 

I stopped at the parking lot of the super market where  a young woman drove into a handicapped parking spot and sprung out from her car  leaping like a rabbit. How abusive, I thought, to use the pretense of a handicap to commandeer the best parking at the market.

The doctor’s waiting room was packed and I sat, fuming, for what seemed hours.  

Fortunately the stop at the cleaners was redemptive. The two clerks are always  good-natured and they make me feel good.  They’d arranged goofy little plastic figurines in the store window for decoration that day.  The figurines  swayed and undulated happily.  They made no sense but between the clerks and the figurines, I felt happy. I  wasn’t critical any more. During the respite at the cleaners I cleared my head  enough to be reflective about my previous  attitude.

I saw just what I had been doing: I’d appointed myself the world’s moral policeman, insisting that the world conform to my high expectations and scolding it with my irritability for it’s failure to do so. Getting the world in line is a huge responsibility for anyone. I wondered though what would I do if the world suddenly conformed to my expectations.

Sure, maybe people would drive the speed limit, or not abuse handicapped parking places or would treat customers with a modicum of respect and doctors would schedule better. The down side is that  all these people would be be just like me: carping and critical in their rectitude.  Even when you’re in the right, being carping and critical is a joyless exercise. You get your way and still remain miserable.

This insight pleased me. My challenge was clear; how could I sustain the wisdom and insights of this moment. Great insights, like mountaintop experiences are typically short lived. They require conscious effort to keep alive.

I’d like to suggest to any of my  readers on the Shore today that if you suffer from a carping and critical attitude, and you’re miserable with it, have someone take you to the cleaners.  It’ll make your day.

Being Present

Newspaper columnists of the left and right typically advance their agenda, criticize their opponents and declare the moral high ground for their party . . . or themselves. Every so often a columnist, normally associated with politics, takes us well outside that box and rather than dividing us with party rhetoric, or promoting his or her rectitude, underscores our common humanity and identifies the importance of what unites us. New York Times’ David Brooks wrote just such a column In January called “The Art of Presence.”

Brooks cites how the Woodwiss family, within three years, underwent horrendous trauma; one daughter had been killed in a horseback riding accident and the other, three years later, was stuck by a car while bike riding, crushing and disfiguring her face. She will have to undergo long and painful operations. This daughter, named Catharine writes:” When you feel like a quivering, cowardly shell of yourself, when despair yawns as a terrible chasm, when fear paralyses any chance of pleasure . . . this is a fight that has to be won over and over again.”

The raw trauma people suffer often makes us feel anxious, uncertain, awkward and even guilty because we’ve been spared such horrors. The self-consciousness we experience in the presence of another’s suffering can precipitate remarks and behaviors, however well intentioned, that are insensitive.

The Woodwiss’s experience has taught them wisdom about relating to suffering people that they pass on to us.  I am editing some of these thoughts to elaborate while hopefully remaining faithful to their intent

Be there. In a culture that is obsessed with doing, the power of an unobtrusive presence  - just being there - cannot be overestimated. Loneliness can be the worst aspect of suffering.

Don’t compare. “I know just how you feel” comments are simply not so. We may imagine but we can’t know exactly and to say so is presumptuous.

Do bring soup. Identify small needs such as a bath mat or soup and provide it. Little things can comfort and mean a lot to sufferers.  

Don’t say ‘you’ll get over it.’ Remarks like this are often in the service of the would-be comforter, not the afflicted. It’s one way a comforter might try to minimize his or her own discomfort.

Walk alongside. The Woodwiss’s make a distinction between the fireman and the builder. The fireman puts the fire out, a critical one-time intervention. The builder, however, comes in for the long haul. Stay connected. Healing takes time.

Don’t presume to make sense of it. As human beings we intuitively seek meaning. In our eagerness to help we often offer formulaic answers to life’s imponderable questions. It doesn’t work. The word “preaching’ has earned an unhappy reputation for that reason. Meaning is discovered by one’s faith, that is, by first learning to live with the pain of trauma that almost always seems void of any meaning.

Brooks summarizes beautifully what the Woodwiss’s have taught him about the path of healing from trauma: “Allow nature to take its course. Grant the sufferers the dignity of their own process. Let them define meaning, sit simply through moments of pain and darkness . . . be practical, mundane, simple and direct.”

Thank you David Brooks for dignifying our human condition by lifting up the Woodwiss’s journey for the country to see.

Hummingbirds, Hot Dogs and the Fourth of July

It’s the 4^th of July, and I’ll bet few Shore residents will be thinking, “ We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” This is our signature declaration of liberty and the occasion of Independence Day.  We’ll be too busy with fireworks, cookouts and family.  Of all our national holidays, Independence Day is the most festive. It’s a blast. Fireworks go off everywhere.

Where I live, if you miss fireworks in St. Michel’s, you can catch them in nearby Oxford or Cambridge. Around the fourth, night skies over the Shore appear like meteor showers.

When I think of the Fourth, my first thought is of fireflies and hummingbirds.   As a boy, on the Fourth, my family would visit a friends’ lakefront home to celebrate. We’d arrive toward evening. We’d swim awhile. As the sun set, fireflies appeared. I loved chasing them and then putting them in a jar. As I ran around, I’d hear something fly past me making a loud buzzing sound. I never saw it. It always scared me. A monstrous bug, I thought. I was about forty years old before I realized it was a hummingbird. Now I associate these experiences with the fourth. Hardly patriotic!

I may not be a model citizen but I am human. However significant personal or national events are, or how joyful or traumatic life circumstances turn out, you and I will invariably recall them first through some peripheral associations as I did identifying the holiday with humming birds and fireflies. We get back to the basics through our convoluted associations. Our minds behave like we peel onions: we start from the outside and work in.

Like fireworks, hot dogs are popular on the Fourth. Nathan’s, on Coney Island, however, takes eating hot dogs way over the top.

Independence Day each year in Brooklyn, N.Y, Nathan’s, a renowned hot dog restaurant, holds a contest. About forty thousand spectators attend to see who can consume the most hot dogs. On July 4^th 2012 Joey Chestnut won his sixth title by consuming 68 hot dogs in ten minutes. The contest was televised. I’ll bet, when Independence Day arrives, Joey’s first two thoughts are: how many and how fast.

I say over the top since I see no relationship between wolfing down 68 hot dogs as relevant to Independence Day. A tenuous case might be made that our Declaration of Independence leaves Joey free to eat himself silly but it doesn’t support my idea of equality: there’s only a winner and lots of losers.

But who am I to judge Joey’s patriotism?  There’s no essential connection to the birth of our nation in my trapping of hapless fireflies or hearing frightening sounds on a summer night, than there is to Joey’s extravagant pig-outs.

In no way are Joey and I equal. I couldn’t eat 68 wieners in week much less in ten minutes.  However, our country secures for both of us the same opportunity: the freedom to follow our bliss, whether we seek it on hot dog buns or by catching fireflies in glass jars.

Now that’s an opportunity worth celebrating.

Talking Trash

Until moving to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, my trash had always been removed by a garbage man. They were always men. We call them sanitation workers, today and women may have joined their ranks –but I’m not sure.

I never knew one as an individual except briefly on Long Island’s North Fork where a garbage man collected our trash in the small rural community where I summered. He liked to talk, share local gossip and would linger with his customers, chatting, before moving on. Scruffy, perhaps, but locals said he owned half of the North Fork.

Living on the Eastern Shore, I first took my trash to the dump. It was challenging, planning my runs, and storing trash judiciously to keep it from animals. It became a bother. A neighbor with garbage pickup invited me to split his bill and I could then bring garbage to his house to be removed.  We talked trash and struck a deal, and again, a garbage man served me. Still, I didn’t know who the man was.

For performing such a critical service, why are sanitation workers so invisible and under recognized?

It’s because the garbage man’s task – the word garbage itself is pejorative – has been framed negatively, unlike, say the banker or the philanthropist who provide communities with things they value, like money. The garbage man, on the other hand, rids us of what we don’t want, but what we also find repulsive.  It’s a dirty job and I think the sanitation worker’s task and person are unfairly disparaged because of trash’s unpleasant associations.

We treat our own personalities similarly.  The character traits that we find repugnant in ourselves, we hope remain hidden from others while secretly wishing someone could just rid us of them. To that end, therapists and analysts are frequently consulted – but we keep such consultations secret. Our more attractive attributes – the ones socially admired - we are more than willing for others to acknowledge. We showcase these characteristics regularly.

Sanitation workers perform three critical services: insuring community health, contributing to an attractive environment, while helping us to maintain our dignity as humans. It’s worth noting that the community’s infrastructure is severely compromised when a waste removal system is not in place. Without sanitation workers, even those community servants to whom we attribute status and honor couldn’t function.

Having said this, for all the years that I’ve enjoyed garbage pickup, it never once occurred to me to give twenty dollars to the worker at Christmas as I normally do for the mail carrier or for the guy that delivers our paper. Considering the magnitude of the service the sanitation worker performs, I’m embarrassed to admit this.

National awareness days are growing exponentially. They honor those of society who serve us well. Why not initiate a “Sanitation Workers Awareness Day.” It would be a start. Next might come bumper stickers that read, “Have you hugged a sanitation worker, today.”  A tougher sell, to be sure, but it might break the discriminatory view we’ve held of those who’ve faithfully rid us of what we find disagreeable and don’t want, thereby freeing us up to seek what we find mo

Being Bugged

           

We can’t live without them. Some, we can’t live with at all. They constitute ninety five percent of the earth’s living organisms. I mean bugs. They’re everywhere. Shore dwellers are painfully aware of that.

           

 Bacteria are often referred to as bugs – they’re not - but if I did include them as bugs and could stack both up like pennies, they would extend a trillion light-years into space. In short, we Homo sapiens are a tiny minority on this planet.  Considering we’re just a handful, we’ve way overestimated our importance.

           

From Biblical times, human kind, now some seven billion of us, has regarded itself – and particularly its males - as the glory of God’s creation; a little lower than the angels but above women and well above bugs. Some say it’s the gift of our thumbs and our self-reflexive capacities and certain body parts that’s given us first class status on the planet but I question this.  God did not impart thumbs, consciousness and select body parts to us for status. They’re assigned for function.  I think we’re wired to be co-creators with God. Whether by inventing wheels or computers or giving birth we practice our divine attributes and become co-creators.  Our self-reflexive abilities allow us to wonder at nature’s majesty, even to weep at sunsets, and also to have compassion.

           

I think we’ve used our divine attributes poorly.

Almost worldwide, and for eons women have been regarded as a minority, not because of numbers, but for the access to opportunities men have denied them. African-Americans have been a numerical minority here but like women, have had opportunities denied them by a majority.  It’s really a guy thing that blacks and women have been a minority for so long. Possessing status and power as men have for so long is like having a drug habit; you never have enough and you’ll do anything to get more.

Majorities and minorities are especially hot topics today.  In the year 2043, Asians and Hispanics are predicted to exceed the white population. Some whites are nervous about this since they know how they once treated minorities.

Minorities, however, may act as oppressively as majorities. Scientists believe that our human activity is responsible for the extinction of an increasing number of earth’s species, including bugs.  In politics our federal government was partially shut down for seventeen days by a small minority called the Tea Party.  This bugged both Democrats and Republicans alike.

A close look at bugs, ants and bees is instructive. Majority groups like these act wisely. They work for the good of all. Yes, their queens do enjoy incredible power and status. However, what defines these groups is cooperation, using everyone’s gifts for the common good.

Best we learn, not from those bugs making spectacular demonstrations by their sheer numbers, like swarms of locusts that waste everything in their wake, but those insects, like bees, that hum along in quiet cooperation, like the world’s peacemakers do. They work night and day, seeking cooperative solutions.  Like so many bugs, we rarely see them at work.