Category: Character

Snap Judgments

It’s a pitiful scene–an obviously homeless guy staring longingly in the store window at the goods that he cannot afford. He hopes for better days ahead. His bags contain all his worldly possessions.

At least that’s the way I see it; that’s my snap judgment.

Maybe that’s the danger–it’s the way I see it. I have no way of knowing what the truth really is.

On my way to work this morning, my own pack was flung over my back containing the necessities for my day: lunch, coffee thermos, a book, iPhone charger, train schedules, camera, dental floss.

One missing essential from my backpack is an extra pair of clean underpants (in case I “were ever in an accident,” so I’ve been advised). But I believe if I go down that road, I’m concerned that I might actually consider undergoing a refreshing underwear change prior to an accident. Then the unexpected accident event might occur, and my rescuers would discover inexplicable dirty underwear in my backpack; that’s why I leave the clean underwear out of my pack.

So I was on my way to work this morning, hiking to catch the train, a podcast speaking through my Klipsch earbuds. Just ahead of me, a shabbily-dressed middle-aged man with a healthy head of black hair crossed the sidewalk.

Then he stopped, and he spewed his observations in my direction.

“You people catching the train always look like third-graders, wearing your backpacks to school!”

I removed my earbuds to hear him more clearly.

“Oh, yeah,” he continued, “and you people always have your cool earphones on!” He pointed to his ears and made a grimace.

Maybe he was looking for a fight. If so, I disappointed him. I kept walking. Nonetheless, the diatribe of this obviously imbalanced individual flustered me.

Maybe he hated me for no reason. Maybe he hated the lunch in my backpack. Maybe he hated all train riders.

Maybe he hated all third-graders. I examined myself and concluded that I did, indeed resemble a schoolboy, light-blue plaid shirt, tidy black pants, and newly-cropped hair.

Then I realized it: I looked successful, and he didn’t. And I received his snap judgement, just as I had judged the homeless vagrant staring in the store window for the things he could not afford.

A prominently-placed doorbell is installed on the wall next to the door that opens from the parking lot into the building where I work. When pressed, the bell rings directly into my room, requiring that I extricate myself from my chair, terminate my other activities, and launch myself down the hallway to open the door. This occurs despite a sign above the doorbell that gives clear directions for who may use and who may not use the bell. Instead, the doorbell’s presence appears to be a sanction for all would-be building entrants to disturb my workday as many as thirty times a day.

By the time I arrive at the door, I have had time to create a full-dossier snap judgment of the demented person standing on the other side of the door.

Instead of peering through the peephole to see who is there so that I can frame my attitude, I fling the door wide open, eyes aflame and staring, mouth corners drawn downward.

And each time, after I regain my composure, I realize just how vast the judgmental swamp really is.

A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water

The ability to walk on water doesn’t quite share the top echelon of human aspirations, such as being able to fly like a bird, travel through time, or (for a girl at least) fit into Cinderella’s glass slipper.

But it’s an ambition that might be up there pretty close to these other passions. After all, the Apostle Peter is reported to have done so—he walked on the water toward Jesus, until he looked down and panicked, losing his faith over what he realized he was actually doing—walking on water!

This video discloses that apparently the freak-out factor can be mitigated by inserted oneself into a plastic bubble and then bouncing out onto the surface of a small swimming pool, thereby approximating the water-walk minus the fear factor. If Peter had simply used an inflatable bubble, he could have spun his bubble all the way to Jesus without the need for faith.

Or, presumably, he just might have kept spinning and spinning like a hamster in an exercise wheel, going nowhere fast.

Remarkably, a short time ago historians unearthed a previously unknown writing by the Apostle Peter. This epistle didn’t make it into the New Testament canon because of its recent discovery. It consists of one chapter, which contains a scant three verses, and was evidently written soon after Peter’s own water-walk experience. Without a formal title given by the Apostle Peter, it is affectionataly referred to as A Dummy’s Guide to Walking on Water. Here, then, is the brief three-verse epistle in its entirety:

  1. Find someone or something that is worth risking everything for.
  2. Decide whether you want to risk everything for that person or thing.
  3. Risk everything for that person or thing.

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.

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.

Half-Drawn Shades

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.

The view might just be better.

This Is Not the Way Home

“Familiarity breeds contempt, while rarity wins admiration.”
–Apuleius (124 AD – 170 AD)

Last Thursday, on my way home from work, my train missed my stop. Now I could have expected to possibly miss my stop from train-induced slumber, but never have I been on a train that missed a stop.

To be clearer, the train performed its customary stop, but the doors on my car did not open. Unable to disembark, the train soon carried on its way, with us, the unwilling passengers who were unable to disembark, still jammed behind the train’s closed doors. Our station quickly passed behind us.

“Press the black button!” someone from our end of the car yelled to those imprisoned behind the doors at the far end of the car. A yelling chorus soon began. “Press the darn button!”

Someone finally pressed the button, apparently alerting the conductor to our unfortunate dilemma, and the train halted in the No Man’s Land that was neither my stop nor the next stop, but somewhere between. Outside, there were only scrub bushes and the gravelly bed of the train tracks.

Eventually, the voice of the conductor came over the intercom, explaining that we would back up to the wayward station we had passed. But there was no movement for five minutes. Finally, the voice on the intercom again: “We do not have permission to back up. We will continue on to the next stop.”

Mild panic spread through the still-standing passengers. How would they get to their awaiting autos, parked at the train station behind us, quickly receding from view? How long would it take to catch the next train going the opposite direction? With some of the women wearing tortuous high heels, would they be forced to walk back to our distant, intended station?

I decided not to wait to find out. When the train finally halted at the next station and disgorged us like confused tourists, I disembarked and guided a blind fellow traveler to the westward-bound boarding platform of this unfamiliar station. Then I started walking homeward.

Fortunately, this station and my usual station were equidistant to my home; I would later measure both routes homeward to be an identical 1.9 miles.

Like ants on auto-pilot returning to their mound, our well-traveled routes always seem shorter than less familiar ones. Today’s path forced me toward new decisions. The homeward hike seemed far longer because of the choices along the way. Which red light would offer me the shorter wait to cross the street? Would the sidewalk or bicycle path be the more direct route? With no experience to inform me, I followed my heart. A broad wooden bridge stretched before me on the bike path. In the growing dusk, I was all by myself, and I stopped.

Construction workers must have left this wooden bridge for my use alone, at this time, on this day, to service my displaced homeward hike.

To my left, I heard the distant sound of the freeway. To my right, a partially-occupied condo complex waited silently for the arrival of the inhabitants at the workday’s conclusion. In the distance, a train horn heralded the arrival of the westbound train that would return the displaced commuters to their familiar surroundings, ants returning to the mound.

A fallen leaf blowing along the wooden bridge reminded me that there are some choices in life that we are able to select, like a well-worn path home. And there are some that we don’t get to choose, like uncooperative train doors.

And sometimes, the only choice we really have is whether we make a graceful transition between the two.

What’s in the Backyard

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.

There’s still time to build a better backyard.

The Power of a One Dollar Bill

I came across a one dollar bill lying directly in front of me on the sidewalk during my daily walk. It fluttered provocatively, like a butterfly during mating season, seducing me to stuff it into my pocket before the former owner noticed its absence.

As I weighed my decision whether to pick it up, I pondered just how much this single dollar bill was really worth. Was the dollar’s loser laying a trap for me, tempting me to steal his greenback? Was I being secretly filmed for the inaugural television episode of “True Mysteries: Who Would Steal a One Dollar Bill”?

So what is the significance of a mere one dollar bill?

Some months ago (my blog dated September 17, 2010), I reported that I had testified on behalf of a two-strike offender, on trial for committing his “third strike” offense, which carried with it a possible life sentence. At 40 years old, some would argue that he should have known better than to steal a backpack from a 99 Cent store, and when confronted, assault the security guard with a substance from a spray can in his pocket. That $1 backpack theft earned him a 30-year sentence, without the possibility of parole. A single one dollar bill could have bought him 30 years of his life.

If I were still a child growing up in Germany, the country where gummy bears originated, the German equivalent of a $1 bill would buy me precisely 400 of these miraculously scrumptious gastronomical delights. The mere thought of these treats would start my salivary glands a-tingling, prompting me to jump onto my three-speed bicycle and sprint to the next village, where the matron tending the store (she knew me well) would dutifully count out: “Eins, zwei, drei, vier…” all the way to 400, while I watched, to be sure she didn’t cheat me out of even one tiny fructose delicacy.

If I had invested a single $1 bill each day for four decades at 7% compound interest, I would have created wealth of more than $80,000 for myself, a gain of $65,500 in interest alone. Too bad I didn’t manage to do that. Alas! My retirement plans are still in tatters.

I recall the $20 bill I came across nearly two years ago, within a few blocks of here. Now that was a find—a miracle!

But what to do with this solitary $1 bill? How could I best honor this unexpected $1 windfall from an unknown donor?

Over the years, inflation alone has rendered it nearly worthless. Or has it? I considered my remaining choices. I could—

–search for the owner, but that would be in vain, I surmised; don’t be ridiculous.

–give it to a needy person, but it likely would be spent on booze. Nah, not on my watch!

–give it to charity. Get real! Their administrative costs would eat up all but a few pennies.

Only one option remained that might revive the value of my anemic dollar bill. With bill in hand, I quickly covered the several blocks to my destination, strode into the establishment, plopped down my $1 bill on the counter, and confidently ordered, “One Mega-Millions lottery ticket, please!”

Death from Drowning

What a relief! Apparently, death from holding the wrong end of a flame thrower, being ejected by a wildly-gyrating Ferris wheel gone berzerk, dehydrating due to blood-sucking zombies, or suffering fatal trampling by frenzied steroid-ingesting giant armadillos could all happen multiple times.

But drowning can only happen once in a lifetime. Whew! One less thing to worry about.