Lessons From Lucy

by Dave Barry

  It’s a long, long night. Our electricity keeps flickering, going out, coming back. Finally around five a.m. we lose it altogether. Fortunately, we have a large propane generator that can power the whole house. It fires up, and our lights and air-conditioning come back on. Unfortunately, our phone, Internet and cable TV are all out, and our cell service is almost nonexistent. Tragically, our digital bathroom scale is still working.

  But we’re OK. Heavier, but OK.

  Daylight finally arrives; after a couple of hours the wind starts to abate. We go outside to survey the damage. Many trees and power lines are down, along with roughly a billion leaves and branches, covering the lawns and sidewalks, blocking the streets with a tangled jumble of green. But our house is OK, as are most of the houses in the neighborhood. Other areas, such as the Florida Keys, took far worse hits. As we encounter neighbors emerging from their homes, we all say the same thing: “We were lucky.”

  And we are lucky, no question about it. But we have not yet escaped the misery that hurricanes inflict. We have simply entered a new phase, which, mental-torture-wise, may be the worst: waiting. We’re waiting for the roads to be cleared, waiting for businesses and schools to reopen, waiting for life to feel at least somewhat normal again.

  Above all we’re waiting for the electricity to come back. If you’ve ever gone for more than a few hours without electricity/Internet/phone/cable, you know how quickly it becomes an all-consuming obsession: When will it come back?

  At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I would compare power restoration to the Rapture, which, some Christians believe, is an unknown time in the future when God will snatch the righteous off the face of the Earth and take them up to heaven. Getting your power back is like that, except instead of God deciding who gets raptured, it’s Florida Power & Light.

  But the process is equally mysterious. Suddenly the houses across the street from you will get power, or even—this is almost unbearably cruel—the house right next door will get power, and your house will remain dark. Sometimes your neighbors will have power for days, and you still won’t. Sometimes you’ll get power for an hour or two, and just when you’re starting to relax, it goes away again. After a few days of this you become desperate. You start to wonder if the electricity god has forgotten you, or if you have done something to offend it. (Maybe I should have bought plywood.) You would sacrifice a goat if you thought it would bring your power back, and you had a goat.

  Fortunately, as I said, we have a big generator. We had it installed in 2005, after Katrina and Wilma left us without power for fifteen days. It cost a LOT of money, and we have to have it maintained regularly, but now, finally, after twelve years of standing by, it is ready, when we really need it, to: break.

  Which is what it does after Irma. It breaks big-time. A generator guy examines it and informs us, somberly, the way you would tell a patient he has a terminal disease, that the generator threw a rod. Essentially our generator has transformed itself into a one-ton paperweight. It is no more capable of producing electricity than a Barcalounger. Apparently all that standing by plumb wore it out.

  So now we have no power, no Internet, no phone, no cable, no cell service. One could argue that, in a way, this is a good thing. We have an opportunity to live more simply, like our ancestors, many of whom were dead by age twenty-seven. Without the incessant electronic distractions of modern life, we can, as a family, slow down, reflect, spend quality time together and actually talk to each other. And we do! The main topics we discuss are:

  • When our electricity will come back.

  • How much it sucks to not have electricity.

  • The purpose of our existence.

  I am of course kidding about that last one. We already know the purpose of our existence: to be on the Internet. It’s scary, how dependent we have become on technology, how helpless—how empty—we feel without it.

  As the powerless post-Irma days drag on, we become increasingly anxious, edgy, irritable. We sleep fitfully, we fret constantly, we accomplish almost nothing. And then, late on the fourth day, we are raptured. Our electricity comes back, and within an hour so do our phones, cable and—Alleluia!—Internet. Within minutes we are back to leading modern, productive lives, by which I mean checking Twitter every ninety seconds.

  So that was how Hurricane Irma affected me and my family. It made us crazy. It utterly disrupted our lives. It caused us to buy lentils.

  Now I’ll tell you how the hurricane affected Lucy.

  It didn’t.

  Well, maybe it did a little. The first time I took her outside after the storm, with the wind still gusting pretty hard and the landscape littered with tree debris, it took her a few minutes longer than usual to locate an acceptable place to pee.

  But that was pretty much it. She didn’t go insane before the storm came, because she didn’t know it was coming. During the storm, she mainly slept. After the storm she was fine. She had food; she was with the people she loves. That’s all she needs to be happy.

  Of course this is because Lucy is, not to put too fine a point on it, a dog. She’s a simpler creature than I am, and thus her needs are simpler than mine. I couldn’t be happy being Lucy; I don’t want to live like a dog. I want to enjoy the benefits and comforts afforded by modern civilization: shelter, indoor plumbing, antibiotics, Pringles.

  But my needs have gone far past the basics. I am way too dependent on a complex, ever-expanding, fragile network of technological conveniences and diversions. The Internet alone is not enough: I need it to be superfast and available all the time, everywhere. A computer alone is not enough; I need one with a huge amount of “RAM” and “gigabytes,” even though I have no idea what those things are. TV alone is not enough: I need a huge screen and a thousand hi-def channels, with everything available on demand. A cell phone alone is not enough: I need one with a screen that has 297 trillion pixels, whatever the hell a “pixel” is. And no matter what I have today, I will need more and better and faster tomorrow, because there will always be cooler gadgets for sale, each one starting out as a technological marvel but quickly becoming, to my mind, a basic necessity.

  In short: to be happy, I constantly need more things.

  Lucy needs food and family. That’s all she needs now; that’s all she will ever need.

  So here’s the lesson she taught me during Irma:

  Don’t Let Your Happiness Depend on Things; They Don’t Make You Truly Happy, and You’ll Never Have Enough Anyway.

  I’m not suggesting that this is an original observation. Wise people have been saying this for thousands of years. I’m also not suggesting you can’t get any happiness from material possessions. Of course you can. It’s nice to have nice things. It’s nice to live in a nice house, drive a nice car, wear nice clothes, eat at nice restaurants. It’s better to have money than not to have money. It would be silly to deny this.

  But there’s a limit to the happiness possessions can provide. Somewhere in the vast lifestyle gap between Buddhist monk and Bill Gates, there’s a sweet spot, where you have enough stuff to be comfortable, but not so much that it’s a burden, consuming most of your attention, leaving little left over for you to pay to your family, your friends, yourself. Where the sweet spot is depends on you, of course, but it’s probably a lot closer to the monk than to Bill.

  Of all the lessons I’ve learned from Lucy, this is probably the most obvious. Yet I’m having trouble incorporating it into my life. I have way more stuff than I need, and I keep acquiring more. I own multiple computers. I own seven guitars and a ukulele, none of which I can play worth a poop. A few years ago I got into photography so I could take pictures of my daughter’s soccer team, which was a fine idea, but somehow I wound up with multiple cameras and a ridiculous number of lenses. In the photography-hobbyist community, I have what is known as “GAS,” which stands for “Gear Acquisition Syndrome.” What happens is, I’ll be looking at some photography website on one of my multiple computers, and I’ll see a review of a fift
een-millimeter lens. (Not to get too technical, but: the number of millimeters of a lens refers to how long, in millimeters, something in the lens is, although I have no idea what.) This review immediately gets my attention, because I don’t have a fifteen-millimeter lens. I DO have both a seventeen-millimeter lens and a twenty-millimeter lens. But I’m thinking I need to buy the fifteen.

  At this point you may be wondering, “How often do you use your seventeen-millimeter and twenty-millimeter lenses?”

  The answer is, not very often. Hardly ever, in fact. They don’t have enough millimeters for soccer.

  “In that case,” you’re wondering, “why would you buy a fifteen-millimeter lens?”

  BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ONE, YOU IDIOT.

  Sorry! I don’t mean to snap at you. This is what Gear Acquisition Syndrome does to a person’s mental processes.

  My point is that over the decades I have acquired a great many unnecessary possessions, and I don’t know how to go about getting rid of them. No, that’s not accurate. The truth is, I don’t know that I want to get rid of them. I am hostage to them, and to technology in general; I am addicted to these things, as I was reminded during Irma.

  I know, intellectually, that I don’t have to be this way. I can be happy with much, much less. I know this because when I was younger and poorer, I was pretty happy with way less stuff.

  Consider electronics, of which I now own a vast array. I grew up in a household that, like most households in the fifties, had one phone. It was a heavy black metal rotary-dial phone that was wired to the living room wall and shared by six of us. Our phone number was 3119. That’s right: four digits, which I still remember, although I cannot tell you where I set my reading glasses down ten minutes ago. It was a very big deal when somebody called long distance. If you answered the phone, and it was the long-distance operator, you’d run through the house, looking for a parent, shouting, “IT’S LONG DISTANCE!” in pretty much the same tone of voice you would use to announce that the kitchen was on fire.

  Aside from the phone, the high-tech items in the early-fifties Barry household were a radio and a record player. We got our first TV somewhere around 1955. It was a large wooden box with a tiny screen, but it was even more exciting than long distance, because on that screen, we could see, for the first time in our lives, the wonder of: static. We did not get great reception. But we were still excited, because this static was coming all the way from New York City. And sometimes, in the swirling gray fuzz on the screen, we could sort of make out an image of . . . Roy Rogers! Or maybe it was Edward R. Murrow. Or possibly it was Roy Rogers’s horse, Trigger. There was no way to be sure, but we didn’t care. We had television! With three different channels, broadcasting three different varieties of static! And we could change channels without getting up, because we had a remote control.

  “Phil!” we would yell at our remote control, which was my younger brother Phil. “Change the channel!”

  My point is, we didn’t have much in the way of electronic diversions, but I managed to have a happy childhood anyway. My friends and I found plenty of ways to occupy our time: we played sports, we rode bikes, we camped out in the woods around Armonk, we told each other jokes, we farted competitively, we blew up a wide array of things with cherry bombs.23 We had a lot of fun without having a lot of stuff.

  I remained relatively possession-free through college. For the decade or so after, I could move all my worldly goods in an afternoon, with the help of a couple of friends, some grocery boxes and a U-Haul. I didn’t have much money, but I don’t recall my finances ever being a cause for unhappiness. I don’t recall feeling that I lacked anything really important. I do recall many good times. And what I recall about those times involves people, not things.

  But somewhere in my later, more affluent years I fell victim to Possession Creep. I could buy stuff, so I did buy stuff. And now I’m hostage to it. And as I said, I’m not sure I have the will to do anything about this.

  But I intend to try.

  For one thing, I’m determined to spend less time on the Internet. I don’t need to check Twitter every ninety seconds. Every two minutes is plenty.

  But seriously: I waste WAY too much time on the Internet, and a whole bunch of that time consists of my reading something and thinking: What a moron. I’m seventy years old; I don’t have that much time left. Why am I wasting it on morons?

  I’m going to read more books. Before I had the Internet, I read books all the time. In recent years, I’ve become much more likely, when I want to read something, to go to the Internet. I’m going back to books. They’re generally less stupid, and they work during hurricanes.

  But mainly I’m going to try to cut down on possessions. As a start, I’m going to stop acquiring them randomly. For example, I’m not going to buy the fifteen-millimeter lens that I would probably never use. Even though it got excellent reviews.

  Also I’m going to try to reduce the mound of stuff I already own, especially all these redundant electronic things. I’m going to figure out which ones I really need, and donate the rest to people or organizations that can use them. I’m determined to clear the clutter out of my life. And I know exactly where I’m going to start.

  The lentils.

  * * *

  23 If you owned a decorative lamppost in the greater Armonk, New York, area in the late 1950s or early 1960s, I am truly sorry.

  THE SEVENTH LESSON FROM LUCY

  When Lucy was fairly new to our household, we got a Christmas tree, as we do each year in observance of the fact that my wife and daughter are Jewish but really enjoy celebrating Christmas and are thankful to have me as an excuse.

  We put the tree up in our living room, where, in accordance with ancient tradition, I spent several festive hours untangling our strings of drugstore tree lights, which had, over the course of the year, formed themselves into a vicious, snarling, basketball-sized wad. After I finally got them strung up, Michelle and Sophie painstakingly festooned the tree with tinsel garlands and red bows and the 2.3 million ornamental tree tchotchkes that Michelle has collected over the years. Then we went out to dinner.

  When we returned, Lucy, as usual, greeted us at the door, but she was abnormally agitated—whimpering, frantically leaping up on us, then flattening herself on the floor in the yoga position known as Pancake Dog.

  If you’re a veteran dog person, you know what Lucy was telling us: she had done a Bad Thing. We hastened to the living room. It looked like a tchotchke bomb had gone off. The tree was down; ornaments were smashed and scattered everywhere. To this day, we don’t know who started it. Perhaps the Christmas tree got aggressive, leaving Lucy no choice but to defend herself. All we know is, Lucy felt very, very guilty, and desperately needed to confess to us.

  This is typical for dogs: not only do they know when they’ve done a Bad Thing, but they also admit to their crimes. If you have two dogs, and one of them does a Bad Thing, they will both act guilty, because they both feel bad. Also they may have forgotten which one of them did it. They are not astrophysicists. If there were a criminal-justice system consisting entirely of dogs, this is how it would work:

  JUDGE DOG: How does the defendant plead?

  DEFENDANT DOG: Guilty, Your Honor.

  DEFENSE ATTORNEY DOG: I also plead guilty.

  JUDGE DOG: Guilty of what?

  DEFENSE ATTORNEY DOG: I don’t know.

  PROSECUTOR AND JURY DOGS: We are also guilty, Your Honor.

  JUDGE DOG: Me too!

  This ability to feel remorse is one of the many ways in which dogs are better than cats. Cats have the morals of Hannibal Lecter. If you come home and find your cat inside your parakeet’s cage, holding your dead parakeet in its jaws, your cat will be like, “Obviously this parakeet committed suicide.” Meanwhile your dog, if you have one, will be moping around under the cage going, “I did it! I ate the bird!”

  My point is, dogs are honest to a fault. There is no deceit or insincerity in them; they are incapable of lying.
If they don’t like somebody or something, they will never pretend that they do. You always know where you stand with dogs.

  I was tempted to make this the Lesson from Lucy for this chapter. Something simple like: Never lie. But I think that would be too simple. For humans, it’s more complicated: sometimes lying is the right thing to do. I will give you a real-life example, involving scallops.

  One year, during the winter vacation break, my family and my wife’s cousin’s family chartered a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands. This is a wonderfully relaxing family vacation that I highly recommend to anybody who has children and a sincere desire to squander their college tuition.

  It’s totally worth it. You wake up each morning aboard a boat anchored next to a lovely palm-fringed Virgin Island ringed by white sandy beaches. You admire the sunrise, have some breakfast, maybe take a dip in the warm, crystal-clear water. Then you weigh anchor, hoist the sails and set off. After an invigorating five or six hours of sailing, you drop anchor next to another Virgin Island. Or possibly you’re still next to your original Virgin Island, having traveled a total of twenty-nine linear feet, because sailing is not a speedy form of transportation. There is a lot of zigzagging.24 In 1492, after two months at sea on his historic voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus could still, if he squinted, see his wife waving to him from the dock back in Spain. If you want to actually get anywhere via sailboat, you have to employ expert seamanship, by which I mean a motor.