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.
If I speak plainly about what I do to earn my monthly paycheck, I will tell you that I work day in, day out, with folks who are on parole. They are all felons. I try to teach them remedial reading and math skills so they can move their lives forward.
They are the people with failed lives. Failed relationships, failed ambitions, failed life choices, failed vocations. Some have been incarcerated for as little as 18 months. Others have served more than 30 years for murder. The latter are the tenderized ones who have very little fight left in them. They want to simply live out their lives peaceably in some sort of decent housing; they can’t know where those resources will come from.
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.
Of all the possible ways there might be to build a piece of Ikea furniture, there is only one correct way. Like pockmarked two-lane blacktop, there are plenty of demoralizing instruction-reading and brain-teasing, spatially-challenging pitfalls on the path to discover that One Correct Way.
I judge the quality of the assembly job by how many parts are left over afterwards. Each piece of Ikea hardware is inevitably an exotic, one-of-a-kind design, fasteners otherwise appearing only on a Mars lunar rover.
This time there was one ungainly fastener with a screw head, a swiveling joint in the middle, ending with a bulbous protrusion that looked like a spare part from a Triceratops. So whatever would I do with this extra shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter thing? Humph! I wondered how much of my money they had wasted by mistakenly enclosing this surplus part in my furniture kit!
Then it dawned on me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have had this shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter left over! Maybe this was a vital part that I should have installed in my prized construction—had I suffered a concentration lapse and lost my way through the instructional pictographs? I feared this piece of dinosauric-appearing hardware—now missing from my construction—might render my piece of furniture too dangerous to use, an oversight that might cause a painful finger pinch or even a fatal collapse upon a favorite family pet!
Search as I might through the booklet of instructions, there was no hope of finding where the missing part belonged.
And there was no doubt what had to be done.
Retrieving a generous length of rope from the garage, I lashed my assembled furniture with the cord, first lengthwise, then sideways, then diagonally. I yanked and knotted the rope tight so there was no possibility that the omission of the missing part could cause bodily harm.
As I lashed down the final ungainly cord while on my belly beneath the chest of drawers, I noticed a hole. It was a hole designed to perfectly fit the missing shoulder-bolt-screw-on-adapter, which now lay uselessly upon the assembly instructions. The blood drained first from my head, then from my limbs. I would have to disassemble the entire piece of furniture to insert the missing part.
There was no way I would do that.
Upon returning the still rope-trussed furniture to Ikea the next day, the salesperson asked for the reason for its return.
“Defective,” I answered in a word.
“I’m sorry,” the salesperson responded, thinking I was referring to the furniture.
“Defective,” I repeated, not bothering to tell her that I was referring not to the furniture.
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.
First, seven-time Tour de France victor Lance Armstrong abandoned his quest to clear his name of drug doping charges. For many, this signaled a guilty plea as the capstone to his multi-year efforts to redeem himself in the bicycle sports arena.
A few days later, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died following heart surgery. Each time we view that 1969 grainy black and white video clip of his first step on the moon, we pause to consider his courage. And, for many, this humble astronaut’s passing seals his noble legacy.
Two stories of life’s fame and fortune, walked out in very different ways.
At the One Stop Shop for Fame and Fortune, a waiting line encircles the block. Fame and fortune is what we think we want. Come and get it!
Aisle One is the widest and most traveled, where laurels are reserved for sports achievements, a dizzying aisle plumped with the most popular—and obscure—awards available to claim. Of course, there are home run records, and most soccer goals scored. Looking for more exotic fame? Help yourself to an ice bowling (yes, there really is such a thing) or Frisbee golf championship or two. On the cycling shelf, I notice a freshly stocked area listing available records under Tour de France, apparently recently vacated of Lance Armstrong archives.
Successive aisles proffer fame and fortune in order of diminishing popularity…famous clothing designers, lawyers who have made fortunes, bank robbers who have stolen fortunes, fertilization-specializing veterinarians….
Let’s see…how do I want to gain my own personalized fame and fortune? What should I pick?
My curiosity drives me to explore the last aisle in the store. Down the damp and darkening shelves, I pass into the bowels of the most unpopular fame and fortune categories: plumbing, bomb shelter design, trash and refuse collection, whoopee cushion manufacturing. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Not for me, thanks!
Ah, finally! Here it is—the very least popular way to gain fame and fortune. I’m at the very end of the very last aisle. Not much traffic down here. The lonely previous visitor here was probably disoriented, looking for the restroom.
I find the final forlorn shelf—and it’s empty. Above it is a tattered, fading label, which, under the gathering dust reads: “Good Neighbor.” The space is reserved but unstocked. There are apparently no takers—it’s tough to gain fame and fortune at the gig of good-neighborliness. It’s just a shelf, an empty shelf with a note scrawled in fading red ink: “Tried that. Didn’t work out.”
Armstrong want-to-be’s, step right up. Come on in from the cold and take your pick. Come on in to the One Stop Shop for Fame and Fortune.
Remember, there are plenty of choices available on Aisle One, on the shelf marked Cycling: Tour de France.
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.
