I don’t know if the phrase “a life well-lived” is in your vocabulary yet, but I suspect at some point that thought enters us all. A young tabebuia tree stands at the edge of our patio. Without yet possessing a strong trunk, she relies upon the two poles beside her to support her until she gets stronger. The two poles are the trunks of two other once-living trees, now being used to train and bear up a new generation of trees. Perhaps, like these trees, our well-lived lives will strengthen others who will follow.
During dinner overlooking San Diego Bay, it was impossible to know what thoughts Dad filtered through his ninety-nine years of life experience. He reminded me that the old computer axiom “garbage in—garbage out” need not apply.
With each passing year, bitterness need not take root. Instead, by choice, life can grow sweeter.
The black-shirted salespeople crowding the T-Mobile telephone’s display floor at this year’s county fair resembled a flock of hungry crows. They had descended to hunt for the morsels that would make their day—fresh customers to purchase profitable cell phone contracts. The trouble was that there were no customers to be found. Either this busy team of sales crows had already choked out demand by peddling their wares to every passerby, or, like nervous insects, the customer population had fled the area, taking flight before a predator.
I’d put money on the latter scenario. Likewise, I won’t buy a redundant, overhyped electronic gizmo.
My life suffers from simpler needs. I crave low-tech solutions to low-tech problems.
Case in point–bathroom odors. I’m tired of pinching out candles that were lit by a previous toilet occupier. The candle flames may have been burning for hours, threatening to melt counter tops and depleting oxygen supplies to a prized co-inhabiting African Grey Parrot.
Dangerous stuff. I need Febreze, the safe and pleasantly-scented odor-killing product.
When it was first introduced to the public, the odor-eliminating product Febreze was a sales flop. It certainly did its job, however. Tests proved that it wiped out unpleasant odors unlike any other product. However, it was a difficult sell because the people who needed it most weren’t interested. They had become so acclimated to the stinky smells embedded in their carpet by incontinent pets that they sensed no objectionable odors. Why would they need an odor killer?
The customers who did decide to try Febreze didn’t realize how effective it was. It destroyed odors so completely they thought the product had done nothing at all. It left no smell behind. There was no smell at all. (There was also no residue and no potential lethal house-burning-down candle flame.)
So what allowed Febreze to eventually succeed? The future of Febreze turned on one small change in the product’s formula. They added a fragrance that the human nose could detect, so that, after using Febreze, whether upon nasty pet carpet or pleasant-enough households, things smelled fresh. Never mind that the added fresh-smelling fragrance held no other functional purpose than to mark its presence.
People sensed it was doing something because it now left an irresistibly beautiful scent behind. Things smelled clean, so the product must be effective.
I, too, have become a convert, so I’ll buy a case of Febreze. I’ll put a can in every bathroom and two spare cans beneath each sink. I’ll put one in the car and in my shoe closet, just for good measure.
At next year’s county fair, I’ll square off by inhabiting a booth perched directly across from T-Mobile’s techno-cornucopia. My humble crew of three will be-shirt ourselves with lavender, blue and pink t-shirts with the word Febreze in-scripted across the front. We’ll challenge one of the top carriers in the telecommunications industry with hope instead of pandering to redundant and ubiquitous telecommunications technology.
There’s hope for our bathrooms. There’s hope for our odors.
There’s hope to change the most banal of life’s daily needs, transforming befouled air by converting it into odor-obliterated, fresh-scented freely-breathable air.
Right now, I need that more than another fancy, feature-driven piece of technology.
From 1950 to 1967, CBS ran the game show What’s My Line? Notable celebrity personalities served on the panel, posing questions of various contestants in order to guess their occupations. They were usually strange or exotic jobs, which would be difficult to guess. I recall one female wrestler who successfully stumped the panel.
By chiseling away with their questions, the panel attempted to carve out the “Real Me” vocational identity of the guests. Their outward appearances often belied their occupational prowess.
The lives of these What’s My Line? celebrities–among my favorites were Bennett Cerf, Steve Allen and Soupy Sales–could be just as strange, interesting and mysterious as the vocations of the people they interviewed.
Dorothy Kilgallen, for example, one of the celebrity hosts, was the only reporter to have interviewed Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. She is widely believed to have later been murdered, so vociferous was her criticism of the U.S. government.
Celebrity status can, of course, be achieved through many other means besides being a guest or contestant on a popular game show. For example, the Olympic Games can bring out surprising—and sometimes shocking—performances from athletes, making or breaking their celebrity. The very public exposure of their talents on display may either impress through a great performance or dismay with a humiliating disaster. Then who, exactly, is the Olympian’s Real Me? It may be as fickle as a single day’s unanticipated performance.
Life can expose the Real Me of ordinary people through such uncertain elements as time, circumstance, environment, and the people we associate with. They can help determine our Real Me at any given moment. Like a many-layered mystery, the Real Me that we present might be kind, responsible or heroic. Or, at a weak moment, we can embarrass ourselves by becoming an irresponsible nogoodnick. Ouch.
Last Friday, I congratulated myself for being my best Real Me. With miniscule custodial help to clean my classroom, I took it upon myself to raid the janitorial closet, seizing broom, mop, bucket and detergent. For the next three hours I sanitized my room. Drenched in perspiration and aching, I fancied myself as something of a heroic figure.
Until, that is, I realized for how many months I had avoided doing this obviously long-overdue chore, leaving undone that which I knew to do. I easily qualified as a nogoodnik.
A What’s My Line? contestant rises or falls on the ability to conceal the Real Me.
But in reality-anchored non-TV-land, being unafraid of knowing the Real Me, and then nurturing the best possible Real Me, is the most hopeful way forward.
Working in a parole office, there are moments to suspend belief. Or perhaps there are rarer moments to actually engage belief. It depends upon which side of belief you start on.
Life stories stretch and relax with no logical explanation. You pick up some and discard others.
Last week, two new students who are on parole began the interminable paperwork required for each new student to enroll in my literacy class: name, address, social security number, parole agent’s name, birthdate…
Wait. What? Birthdate?
One student’s birthdate was January 13, 1979.
I reviewed the other student’s data. And his birthday, amazingly, was also January 13. Even more astoundingly, the year was also 1979.
Two students registered for my class at the same time, on the same day, who were also born on the same day, the same month and the same year.
What are the chances?
How many of us have experienced similar weird circumstantial encounters in our own lives? And, perhaps, we have narrowly missed other up-to-chance events that we will never find out about. How could we know if we passed a first grade classmate, thirty years later, walking just beyond our sight on our hurried way to the post office?
Oh…one other detail. My own birthday is also January 13. So three of us sat together, joined together by a common birthday, and that was all.
Two fellows on parole and one teacher. All joined by January 13. Numerically expressed, the date becomes 1-1-3.
We held up our fingers to mark the circumstance. In some small and weird way, we bonded over something so apparently trivial as our birthdays.
I wondered how many other “one-one-threes” are waiting to be discovered in the people right around us. “Something-something-somethings”—they are the small things that can remove barriers.
In a world shredded by criminal backgrounds, race, religion and social class, we may find ourselves repeating the seemingly inane quote by the late Rodney King, “Can’t we all just get along?”
By discovering more 1-1-3s in the weaving of our lives, perhaps we can.
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.
The shades are descending; they’re being pulled down. It’s the end of an era.
Today was the last reunion of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. The Association is being officially disbanded.
One Association member who survived the Japanese attack explains, “We just ran out of gas, that’s what it amounted to. We felt we ran a good course for 70 years. Fought a good fight. We have no place to recruit people anymore: Dec. 7 only happened on one day in 1941.”
The membership of the Association is gradually evaporating from the attrition of old age, poor health and death.
It’s an unavoidable reality. No matter what our age, change due to external influences presents its challenges, whether from age and health issues, or from job loss. We feel less in demand—less needed.
We may feel like out-of-print books. The contents are still useable, but the worn cover and bent spine are not so fashionable anymore. Our sphere of influence—if we feel we ever had one—is contracting still further.
That’s life. Over time, we sense our world eroding. Tasks that we performed with ease and skill are handed off to other folks we don’t know. No matter that we still can handle the tasks with the same ease and skill. Others don’t perceive it that way, and they are the ones now in control. It’s time for us to move on.
So…what’s next? Move on to what? Our ego feels deflated.
But it’s not like there’s nothing else to do.
There’s time to focus on relationships and the skills required to being a good friend. Listening more and talking less. Befriending those who have no ability to advance our own ambitions. Thanking them, aloud.
There’s time to focus on reinforcing our values. Relaxing one discipline in our lives seems to relax several disciplines. If we write down the things we would like most to change about ourselves, they nearly always relate to the lack of specific disciplines. Time to focus on our values.
There’s time to focus on undeveloped skills. A friend of mine is taking up writing. Always a good verbal communicator, job loss and health issues forced him to re-think his goals. He’s retooling himself to write promotional materials. He’s completed the coursework. He’s made contacts. He’s reinventing himself.
Maybe we should close the shades on the room in which we find ourselves, move on to the next room, and again eagerly raise the shades.
Just beyond the prim, tidy front yard intended for view by the general public, lies a more restricted, wilder place, a vestige of nearly-forgotten cops and robbers chases, water balloon fights and a blow-up swimming pool with a three-week lifespan before the leaks would arrive.
Backyards hold private mysteries that go undiscovered even by others within the same household. Here, a mother recalls a hedgehog that tore up the lovingly-weeded annuals. There, children observed a feral cat bear her kittens, creating the myth of fierce cat-creatures that toy soldiers would hunt for several summers. Dreams of future baseball and soccer triumphs would eventually crowd out fights between plastic soldiers clutching plastic guns.
Gradually, the forgotten green soldiers buried themselves within misplaced Lego brick fortress walls, long since concealed beneath the roots of a giant oleander bush. There, they guarded the small menagerie of plastic farm animals. A tiny replica of Trigger peered into the dirt, searching for Roy Rogers, unaware of his presence six inches deep in the dirt just beyond the fading pink fragment of hula hoop.
Another world lay buried just below this community of plastic. It consisted primarily of rusting creations: toy cranes, a windup monkey frozen by time, and a piggy bank containing 16 coins, all bearing dates prior to 1930.
And so the sediment treasures continue downward, each layer less familiar and more mysterious than the one before. Who can know what lies beneath the ancient Indian relics and buckles of explorers, and what creatures conquered and then perished in a deepening layer of sediment before human witnesses existed.
It will be our turn to lay a layer down. As the gigabytes of discarded data settle into the next layer of strata, I’m hoping for more than irretrievable bits and bytes, more than fading plastic and more than rusted scrap metal.
I’m hoping for a layer that will last: for faith well-founded, for promises well-kept, for trust well-earned, for love well-invested, for encouragement well-placed.
