crdahlberg

We’ve Been Harding-ized

In 1865, perhaps the homeliest of all American presidents died. He was also possibly the most capable, brilliant and beloved man who has lived in the White House. At 6 feet 4 inches tall, he was impossible to ignore, and socially awkward by all accounts.

He was a man of exceedingly humble origins, and he never forgot it. He was the third president to die in office.

In the same year that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Warren G. Harding was born. He grew into a man of striking appearance. In stark contrast to Lincoln’s physical ugliness, he was described as “more than handsome.” “His suppleness, combined with his bigness of frame, and his large, wide-set rather glowing eyes, heavy black hair, and markedly bronze complexion gave him some of the handsomeness of an Indian.” “His voice was noticeably resonant, masculine, warm.” “His manner…suggested generous good-nature, a wish to give pleasure, based on physical well-being and sincere kindliness of heart.”

In the deadlocked Republican Convention of 1920, supporters of the two leading candidates were forced to find a compromise presidential candidate. They landed on the sixth candidate in the field of six, choosing Warren G. Harding because he looked so much the part of a president.

In contrast to Lincoln, Harding is widely considered to be one of the worst American presidents. His speeches were “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.” His merely average intellect appeared overwhelmed by the rigors of the job. His administration was riddled with scandal and corruption.

He did not have the chance to complete his disastrous first term. Two years into his presidency, Harding suddenly died from a probable heart attack. He was the sixth president to die in office.

We live in a day in which we are encouraged to set great goals by stretching our wings wider, achieving ever more significant accomplishments. We are told that if we believe in ourselves and try hard enough, we can attain anything, whether pushing for that job promotion we believe we deserve, or hoping to gain the recognition of a hard-fought achievement.

That may all be well, but sometimes that “anything” we are encouraged to accomplish at great personal expense might be best left for another. Like Harding, we could be extending ourselves beyond our gifting and flirting with disaster–in Harding’s case, overreaching beyond his abilities may have caused his heart to finally give out.

Perhaps it is better to do lesser things with greater excellence, to know the limits of our reach, to recognize and accomplish that which is truly within our ability and scope to do, and to do it well.

Maybe we’ve been “Harding-ized” just a bit–to believe the hype that there is more importance about ourselves than we are given credit for, so we pursue a never-ending, impossible quest to rise to the top.

There’s something to be said for recognizing and living within our own abilities. It’s better to be remembered for who we are–not for how we’re perceived.

Outcast Trash

“Whose trash is this in my trashcan?”

The outburst erupted from my neighbor, whose office is just across the hall from mine. My hallmate is typically kind, reserved, and polite. But not today.

“Look at this stuff in my trashcan! Who has the right to dump their stuff into my trashcan?” She was furious at the fact that someone, apparently walking down the hall and in need of disposing of rubbish, spotted her trashcan just inside her unlocked office door and discarded unwanted items in her personal trashcan.

I had never before pondered the concept of personal trash, especially when the offices are housed within a state agency.

On the other hand, maybe working in a state agency adds legitimacy to the notion of personalized trash. Perhaps, since none of us owns anything in the building save the clothes on our back, our trash becomes a desperate expression of our individual identities.

So—perhaps there should be a certain sense of injustice when someone disposes of something in our trash can without permission, mingling their unapproved garbage with our own. Sure, in a sense we’ve already disowned our trash by disposing of it in the trashcan, but just before that, darn it, it was ours! We had the power to choose whether to keep it or lose it; we enjoyed total dominion over it while it was still ours. It was our gum wrapper wrapped around our discarded gum that we chomped like cud all the way to work after the near-mishap with the eighteen-wheeler on the freeway. It was our own t-shirt, shredding from wear, that we had worn to the concert with that special someone who broke our heart; when the arm pit fabric ripped at work, we covered ourselves in a too-warm sweater as we grieved and fended off quizzical looks from our coworkers the rest of the day. It was our broken porcelain mug from that once-ever trip to Prague that fell off our desk and shattered.

And now our sacred trash is being spoiled by fabric-staining used tea bags and filthy scum-soaked paper towels. What gives them the right?

To be fair, there was nothing sacrosanct about my hallmate’s trash. Had we been in India, it would have qualified in the lowest-caste variety—the “untouchables” of the trash heap. It held no higher pedigree than the vagrant off-cast that she deemed had polluted her own particular rubbish. Sure, there might be a gaping hole in the logic of personalizing discarded waste, but somehow, the co-mingling of deposited trash can rile us.

The “not my trash” movement has finally made it into the office building. For decades, we’ve managed to avoid the personalizing of our own trash by exporting it all over the globe for disposal. Let Thailand take our toxic rubbish, whether computer monitors, decrepit cell phones, or toys gently emitting low levels of radiation into the cribs of unsuspecting babies. Bare-footed men on the coast of Bangladesh bust up our rusty old retired marine vessels, recycling their carcasses, eventually to create brand new ships. Let somebody else die from this dangerous and polluting stuff instead of us!

This morning, when I arrived at my office and the fluorescent lights flickered alive, I realized with a start that the “not my trash” anthem had taken a shocking and unwelcome further advance—it had entered the bowels of my own office.

There before me—in my own circular trashcan—lay the hideous vulgarity of Not-My-Trash! At first, all I could feel was the obscene sense of having been personally violated by an unapproved discard. What could it be? Loathsome, unidentifiable green scum from an ancient lunch bag discard? The disposed carcass of a squashed cockroach? Plasticized remains of melted and reconstituted petrified Jujube candies?

I moved closer to my trashcan, squinting through half-closed eyes to dilute the grisly vision of what illegal trash dumping I would identify.

And—there it was—something I did not expect. A handsome Starbuck cup with striking green logo, barely used, stared back at me from the bottom of the trashcan. It was a high-class discard, having only recently treated its former owner to a five-dollar-and-change extravagance on the way to work. Inwardly, I writhed in embarrassment. It was a good and honorable discard; I wondered if I could provide the same sense of joy to someone today, a joy that this disposable cup of java had already contributed.

It was time, too, for my hallmate to learn the lesson that I had just learned—that all trash that’s not my trash is not bad trash. It, too, used to be somebody’s treasure.

So I did the only reasonable thing. I gingerly picked up the Starbuck’s cup and went to the hallway, checking both ways to be sure no one observed me. Then I carried it across the hall and dropped it into my hallmate’s trashcan.

Paunch

The trouble with paunch is that it appears so gradually, nearly imperceptibly, like dough rising. “No, I’m not gaining weight,” we convince ourselves. “I look the same as I did last week and the week before.”

But when we glimpse a picture of ourselves from a year ago or five years ago, we may see a person we don’t quite recognize.

“That was me?’ we exclaim. “Golly, what happened? I’ve porked out!”

Yup. Porked out. The five or ten pounds can hide beneath baggier clothes for a while. But the arguments to justify our progressively dilapidated appearance have already begun.

I’m told that our behavior works something like this: Cues trigger habits that result in rewards. That’s the habit chain.

We sit down to watch TV–that’s the cue. (Now the brain is on autopilot.) This launches the trigger—go to the refrigerator. Finally, the reward—the almond caramel fudge ice cream. Each time we perform this ritual, the cue-trigger-reward process is reinforced.

Our behavior will only be altered by identifying and removing or modifying the habit chain so that the sequence of events is broken.

Like the grasshopper who paid attention only to his own comfort instead of gathering food for the winter, we choose to maintain the convenience of our unhealthy habit chain.

Here’s the even more uncomfortable part. After the habit chain plays havoc with our lives, and things have gone from bad to worse, a different word describes our behavior.

It’s a scary word that refers to the unwillingness to take advice or correction.

That word is obstinate.

Cutting the Losses

The leaves and other tree droppings have permanently etched brown stains into her once-handsome skin. Her plastic headlight covers, foggy and scratched, need cataract surgery to restore their illuminating beams. Her tires are well-worn like ancient running shoes. Her running gear has logged nearly 150,000 miles.

In short, she is old, tired and increasingly feeble. She has faithfully served transportation needs for nearly a decade-and-a-half without complaint. If car years track similarly to dog years, she is nearing 98 years old.

Though she is still running, I have been advised to dump our gerontological companion. Possible dangerous behaviors and huge repair bills loom just around the corner. The cost of repairing her now exceeds her dollar value in the used car market.

When she departs my driveway for the last time, she will leave a small stain of oil behind, a reminder of her that will fade with time. She will carry with her the secret stories of our lives. How she carried me and patiently waited for me while I interviewed for a desperately-needed job. When ferrying the family pet to the veterinarian, she never complaining about the scratchy toenails and the fleas it deposited. She faithfully carried vast quantities of weekly groceries, enduring spilled jugs of milk and the sharp spikes of pineapple skin.

Like precious gifts left in the tomb of an ancient pharaoh, she will carry off bits of our lost pocket change hidden in a corner of faded carpeting, and stale gummy bears concealed beneath folds of stained upholstery.

I understand that, in time, the pain over losing our nonagenarian vehicle will pass.

But when the first of the 72 loan installments to pay for her replacement comes due, the memory of losing her will be all the more bittersweet.

The Biggest Bozo in the Room

Perhaps you’ve been there, smack in the middle of a roomful of folks you didn’t plan on spending the evening with. You feel out of place. But you are expected to be there—it’s an obligation. Endeavoring to bridge the discomfort gap, you find yourself attempting to create interesting small talk with a woman whom you’ve never met before. She asks how you like your job and your boss. Fishing for a scintillating response, you turn a phrase that goes to the edge of your comfort zone.

“He’s a good guy to work for,” you suggest, “even though his three-way bulb seems stuck on ‘dim’ most of the time.” It’s a mild dig that many an employee might utter, out of their boss’s earshot.

She laughs at your cleverness; you secretly crow at your ability to charm.

Only later, as you drift awkwardly around the currents of the other partygoers, do you discover—in horror—that the woman you were trying to impress with your clever comments is your boss’s wife’s best friend. Your life passes before your eyes. You search for a rewind button, but there is none. Your head feels like exploding. You feel broken, inexcusably stupid, and prepare a vow that you will never again flirt with stupid small talk. You consider cutting out your tongue.

In the far corner of the room, four women are remarking over images on a cell phone—pictures of a baby. The women gush over the child in the customary, “Oh, how cute!” and, “So sweet!” vernacular. Linda offers an expression intended to trump the small talk of the other women.

“Look at the cute nose!” Linda exclaims, “Why, it’s just like Allen’s!”

The comment is met with dead silence. Finally, “Linda, who is Allen?”

Too late, Linda realizes that she’s the only one who knows about the existence of Allen, and Allen’s relationship with the “oh-how-cute” baby’s mother.

Linda feels the temperature in the room spike, turning her head to hide her face’s fierce scarlet color. “Hello, Joan!” She pretends to recognize a friend across the room, her means of escape. Behind her, and not trailing off quickly enough, Linda hears her soon-to-be former friends, who don’t pretend to be fooled: “Who’s Allen?”

I’ve never tried blowing up a tomato in a microwave, but it must be the same explosive temperature that our heads reach when we realize we have just said way too much. The ears blaze. The throat seizes as if attempting to swallow a small grapefruit.

Moments later, the blood abandons the head as quickly as it arrived, leaving the cheeks pale. Below the eyes, faint veins just beneath the surface paint the skin a sickly green pallor. Depression creeps into our lightheadedness. Knees twitch and wobble.

We have committed an unpardonable sin. How can we recover? We feel shipwrecked, marooned, and without the means to express our sudden and agonizing torment.

“When will I just learn to shut up?” we agonize.

Days later, a work associate pulls up a chair and queries us about our apparent declining condition. As our world comes unglued, it becomes increasingly difficult to disguise our demise. We agonize as we wade through the muck of our fallibilities, ashamed and embarrassed.

After our gut-wrenching confession to our workmate, the friend offers only unanticipated silence.

“Well?” we demand, “How can I ever put my life together again? The shame!”

The patient friend on the chair finally offers an unexpected response.

“I used to be like you,” he explains. “I agonized over the things I’ve said and the length of time people would remember my inappropriate comments.”

He pauses, then finishes. “I know you feel lousy over what you think you’ve communicated to others.

“But don’t worry about it. Nobody ever really listens to us as much as we think they do!”

Pursuit

It requires awesome powers of perception for a fish to distinguish between food in the water and a beguiling lure concealing a deadly hook.

Fish frequently pursue their prey early in the morning and in the dusk as the sun descends.

Likewise, human courtship demands keen discernment. A momentary lapse can dangerously disclose either too much or too little of the pursuit.

Humans frequently pursue their prey early in the morning, in the dusk as the sun descends, or at any time in between.

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!”