Month: January 2012

Moonrise Over Lowe’s

The second trip to the hardware store to fix the toilet would complete the job.

The first trip had provided me with a top-of-the-line flushing mechanism consisting of a plastic emergency water shutoff gizmo to solve the nasty Running Water Syndrome from which some toilets suffer. A secondary chain poised at a precise tipping point would trip a sliding valve in the case of a stuck rubber flapper drain malfunction, shutting down the water intake as spectacularly as Moses holding back the Red Sea.

Experts in exotic toilet flushing devices will know exactly what this is and how it operates. The rest of us—well, me, at least—couldn’t get the darn thing to work. Arms soaked, finger-skin shriveled and spongy, a pool of water around the base of the toilet floating away the floor tiles, water shutoff valve all but worn out from all the on and off twisting, tank water drained enough times to fill a ten-foot-at-the-deep-end swimming pool, I finally surrendered. The thing wound up in the trash can; I didn’t want to return it to the store and risk the chance that another customer would purchase it, try to install it, and ponder suicide in his failed attempt to get it to work in his own toilet.

Returning to the hardware store for my replacement purchase, the sheer quantity of hardware gadgetry and home improvement devices in a single aisle at Lowe’s makes a person appreciate why the population of China is required to be so enormous. It takes a huge percentage of the population to produce the vast selection of goods crowding the shelves. If we couldn’t rely on them, these aisles would be empty.

Electronic mousetraps, pivoting ladders and exotic window blinds able to be opened and closed in any of 15 possible pre-set configurations all crowded the aisles for attention. My head swooned. I looked at my list to remind myself why I had come. It said: “Very basic toilet flusher.” Oh, yeah.

I found the very basic toilet flusher I had picked up and discarded on my previous toilet flusher-seeking trip. This time, I picked it up lovingly, like a butcher picks out the perfect steak. Yes, this would do it. Perfect. No gadgets. And the box said, “World’s quietest toilet flusher.” What was there not to like? It rode to the checkout stand in my cart alone, not sharing the space, like a homecoming queen perched upon a float.

It’s a wonderful occasion to find the thing that suits one’s needs, whether a toilet flusher, a good fitting pair of shoes, or a love that has been long-sought. It makes the world feel right.

As I walked to my car in the Lowe’s parking lot, my black plastic treasure in my white shopping bag, the moon was rising, its luminescent light reminding me of the bright and shiny white porcelain of a lowly, soon-to-be rehabilitated toilet bowl.

Damaged Bodies

This morning on the radio, I heard a woman tell the story of losing her voice. In place of her vocal chords, which had been removed because of disease, a device in her throat tried to overlay words upon the breath she expelled from her lungs. The resulting communication could not mimic the subtle intonations that a human voice produces. What remained was a digitally-produced monotone simulation of speech, her emotions drained from her words.

I expected this woman to be bitter over losing her own voice forever, never to sing, never to speak without drawing unwanted attention from those within earshot.

The sounds she emitted were less than sonorous. But the words she delivered were haunting.

“People remember me now,” she explained.

“Where have you been?” the salesperson had asked. “I’ve missed seeing you!” Our vocal-chord deprived friend had visited the shop only once previously—a full year ago.

“Since I lost my voice, I’ve never been happier,” the odd, buzzing voice explained. “I’ve learned to value what I have left. I still have my life. Yes, I may have lost my voice,” the digitized vocal chords continued, “but I’ve really gained my life. From that day forward, I have never had a bad day–ever!”

Despite having minimal ability to express emotions through her voice, her words had no difficulty traveling from her heart to mine.

I felt myself shrink just a bit. I wondered what conditions it takes to have a good day.

Losing a voice might do it. Paralysis might do it.

Or maybe changing an attitude would do it.

Imagine that.

Mental Television

When is Yogi Berra’s birthday? What date did the War of 1812 begin? Exactly how many days until July 4? How many years and days old is your friend? What day did Saigon fall to North Vietnam?

If you’re standing on the corner waiting for the bus with John (not his real name), as I do nearly every workday, he could instantly tell you the answers to these and a great variety of other odd, date-related trivia questions. John has an exceptional ability to recall and calculate dates.

He does not consider his abilities exceptional. In fact, John assumes that everyone should be able to perform these same mental gymnastics.

John is exceptional in another way—he speaks with perfect diction. Not just good diction—perfect diction. He eschews colloquialisms and possesses such a perfectly neutral dialect that, had he served as his speech coach, he could have made George W. Bush sound positively educated.

There’s one more unusual thing about John. He’s schizophrenic. He is so heavily medicated that all expression is permanently drained from his face. He struggles to stay awake, even when he’s standing at the bus stop.

John regularly lists all the old VHS tapes and DVD movies he has recently watched, listing all the actors’ names, the names the characters play in the movie, and of course, the year of each movie’s release.

John waits with me at the bus stop as he travels from the mental health facility to his group home. In one hand he always clasps a round red plastic container held together with scotch tape, white paper cutouts taped to the front to mimic a television screen and tuning knobs. The white paper at the top identifies his construction as “Mental Television.” In his other hand he holds a crude, hand-made semblance of a person’s face drawn on paper cup and attached to the end of a screw. It represents the face of a man who is watching the Mental Television.

I hope to see him at the bus stop again tomorrow, when I will again try to understand my friend, the Fabulous Calendar Man, and tune into the Mental Television that holds his view of the world.

The Undergarment Revolt

It’s the sort of mistake any young store clerk could make. But it’s also the sort of mistake that could get a person fired from the retail industry—working alone in the women’s undergarment department, she had mistakenly left the drawer open.

It’s not that this sort of carelessness has never happened before, but this singular event may have launched an unexpected revolt in the undergarment industry. Indeed, the so-called Spring Revolutions recently blazing around the world may have finally come home to roost on our own favorite retail clothing store shelves.

There’s more to say about our beleaguered sales girl in a few moments…

Some say that the fabled Boxer Shorts Rebellion started it all. Protesting poor shelving conditions in a particularly dilapidated K-Mart store, men’s underwear had gone berserk—not the employees, but the underwear itself. After careful planning, sometime during the darkened nighttime hours, as the security guard inspected plumbing supplies at the far end of the store, Men’s Shorts gathered their combined strength into a unified effort and slid quietly from their wrappers, swapping packaging with one another. During the mass rebellion, 30” waist size briefs exchanged packaging with 44” size boxer shorts. Fashionable, Speedo-like apparel in bold purple and green patterns ended up disguised in the wrappings of special-purpose easy-on disposable, moisture-resistant medical undergarments.

The payoff came the day after the purchase of the underwear, when irritated customers of all dimensions and proportions angrily returned their mislabeled goods. One beanpole-shaped fellow complained that his brand new shorts were so large that they disappeared down his pant legs. Another red-faced customer of enormous potbellied proportions threatened to sue if the feeling didn’t soon return to his mid-region, claiming that he was nearly strangulated by a pair of microscopic sport briefs masquerading in a box colorfully labeled “Fashionable Styles for Portly Gentlemen.”

The rebellion was so overwhelmingly successful and held such enduring impact that the men’s undergarment department had been shut down and disbanded. Atop the empty shelves were forbidding warning signs, declaring “Shop at Your Own Risk!” These signs had been scrawled over with newer disclaimers: “Due to English Language Problems with Suppliers in Thailand, Product Contents Can No Longer Be Guaranteed.”

The ensuing copy-cat episodes in other men’s undershorts departments in neighboring stores strangled reliable supplies and raised the local men’s undershorts costs. For three months running, men’s undergarment sales became Internet giant Amazon’s most profitable revenue source.

Some say it’s the elastic in the undergarments that made possible the nimble maneuvers in and out of boxes so rampant among men’s undershorts. If true, the theory yields credence to the very newest contagion of the spreading dilemma: women’s undergarments. Similarly elastic, the potential revolution among women’s departments could be even more calamitous. Untold yards of angry stretching and snapping elastic, with sinister purposes, could pose a far greater threat to the security of the nation’s undergarment supply.

And so we return again to our hapless women’s undergarment clerk who left the drawer open, and whom I happened to photograph at the very moment of the dawn of this new feminine undies insurrection. Panic stricken, one can see the young woman, clad in black, grabbing for the massively escaping avalanche of unmentionables, making their getaway from the unlocked drawer towards the freedom just beyond the store’s doorway.

Standing just beyond the door, I panicked at their sinister approach toward me, straps wildly flailing like tentacles. I bolted down the street out of cowardice and fear of the deranged elastic, uncertain what damage massive quantities of these angry garments could inflict. Bruised skin from close-range, furious snappings would be the least of my concerns. Pit marks and scarring from metal clasps, asphyxiation by elastic strangulation—it was all possible.

I sympathized with the injustice heaped upon the undergarments, their inhumane storage in quarantine-like conditions within locked, pitch-black drawers. But I also pitied the unsuspecting young woman clerk, nearly out of her mind with fear over her own fate.

My call to 911 brought the police and firemen, who arrived just as the first garments snapped and stretched beneath the door, intent on their rubber-charged gallop down the street.

Their escape was short-lived. As chemicals from the firemen’s hoses quickly mixed with that of the garments, the lively snapping and popping of elastic turned into a gargling, bubbling goo as, in short order, the chemical reaction dissolved both the garments and their frenzied game plans. Within moments, the firemen’s hoses had turned the undies into melted mini-towers of pink and yellow and white sloppy glop.

From somewhere deep within the mass of melting cotton, nylon, Spandex and lace, there came a faint voice: “Ladies, stick together! We will rise again!”