Wise Men and Other Stories
Page 4
Dear Mike,
I thought I’d share a special memory that I think about every year about this time. It was a long time ago... I don’t know how many years. It was one of the times you came down for Christmas. It was Christmas Eve as I remember, and we didn’t have a tree yet, and when you came in, we went and got one. It was the first time I ever got to help pick out a tree. I don’t remember if anyone else was with us or not. I just remember you and the tree. So every year when we’re going to get a tree, I get a special feeling and remember you on that Christmas Eve and that tree and I smile. Thanks.
Love,
Sharon
That’s the note, and there’s not much else I want to say about it. Except that if there’s anybody out there in the world that you like and feel good about—and if there is any reason at all to suspect that they may not know how you feel—for God’s sake, tell them. I guarantee they’ll appreciate it.
The EcoSphere
Hold the world in your hands. That’s what the advertisement for EcoSphere says.
EcoSphere is a little glass ball. It really does fit in your hands. Inside the ball are several things: water, algae, bacteria, and some tiny shrimp. It is billed as “man’s first successful attempt to create a self-sustaining life system.”
It’s actually a pretty interesting idea. Sunlight provides energy for the algae and bacteria. They, in turn, supply food and oxygen for the shrimp. The shrimp contribute by producing carbon dioxide and “wastes,” which keep the algae and bacteria alive. (Funny how the highest life form in most ecosystems ends up listing “wastes” among its major contributions.)
Developing this little self-sustaining world was no easy task, I’m sure. Yet I find something kind of unsettling about the whole thing. Maybe it’s the fact that this little world was developed by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. You’d think that our top rocket scientists would have more important things to do.
But on second thought, I can see where the delicate balance between creatures of the world would be of concern to any serious scientist.
So it must be something else about the EcoSphere that bothers me. It could be that this little item is being sold in catalogues as a Christmas gift idea. A very expensive gift idea at that. It goes for up to $500. You can buy one, set it on your desk or your bookshelf, study it, observe it, maybe meditate on it. The manufacturer boasts that the shrimp can live for more than five years.
They even got Carl Sagan to hype the EcoSphere when it first came out. Quoth Sagan regarding the organisms in the globe: “You find yourself worrying about them, rooting for them.”
The commercialization bothers me a little. So does the notion of “owning” a little world. We can’t really “own” life. The idea of holding it in the palm of your hand is a bit too much. It deifies man in an age when we would be better served by humility.
I also find it a little unsettling that you could find yourself pulling for or even identifying with a shrimp. That scares me. The creatures in the EcoSphere only live for five years or so. That’s a pittance in the whole scheme of things. Then again, in the whole scheme of things, seventy or eighty years is also a pittance. Suddenly, the shrimp and I have more in common that I care to acknowledge. I’m not trapped inside a glass ball, but I’m not likely to leave the planet any time soon either.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the EcoSphere itself doesn’t bother me. It might actually be a good thing for everybody to have one of these little items. Looking at the EcoSphere from your desk chair is a little like looking at the Earth from the Moon. You feel kind of sorry for those little waste-producing shrimp. They are not long for this world. So an EcoSphere could serve as a constant reminder of our mortality and of the delicate balance amongst living creatures. It might raise our consciousness a little.
And in the end, that’s what I find most troubling—not the EcoSphere, but the realization that our consciousness still needs raising. Too many people still disregard the concept of our own ecosystem. And because we haven’t acknowledged the fact that we are all part of a very fragile ecosystem, we fail to treat the environment, the other creatures in the world—even other human beings—with proper respect and concern.
I probably will never own an EcoSphere. The idea of owning a world still bothers me. But I’m glad somebody invented it. It makes you think. And while it’s not very pleasant to identify with a shrimp, it’s probably a pretty important thing to do from time to time.
Little Arms Around My Neck
For Kathleen
After a marathon day of opening presents and nonstop play, you have collapsed exhausted on the living room floor. It is now my job to get you up and put you to bed. Christmas is over.
I try to wake you up, but you can barely open your eyes. “Carry me, Daddy,” you say, and as I pick you up, you put your little arms around my neck.
You are almost three, and it occurs to me that there will not always be little arms around my neck. So I am taking nothing for granted. There is not a single little hug that doesn’t go straight to my heart and give me a thousand reasons for being.
Sometimes in the middle of a hug, you threaten to “eat me up”—which consists of a tight hug accompanied by some loud chomping noises. When the chomping noises begin, it makes me think of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, one of your favorite stories. It contains one of the best lines in all of literature.
Early in the story, a little boy named Max tells his mother he’s going to eat her up, and she sends him to his room for being such a wild thing. Then Max imagines a land where he becomes king of all the wild things. The other wild things love Max and don’t ever want him to leave. “Oh, please don’t go,” they say. “We’ll eat you up, we love you so.”
That’s what comes to mind when I feel little arms around my neck and hear little chomping noises. So I never take hugs for granted.
And later, when you are older, when I am no longer able to lift you up and feel your little arms around my neck, I will not be sad. Instead, I will look forward to each new hug from you, allow myself to feel it and enjoy it and love it every bit as much as I felt and enjoyed and loved your hugs when you were a little girl.
And above all, I will hug you back.
Holiday Parties
No matter how many company holiday parties I go to, I never feel completely at ease. Fact is, you’re essentially being asked to socialize with people you normally try to avoid.
Also, I have to confess to what may be inappropriate thoughts. For example, I begin to fantasize that our new intern might not mind if I were to catch her under the mistletoe. Or I imagine that this would be the perfect time to tell the president about my ideas for restructuring the company—which naturally include a promotion for me.
Of course, I know in my heart such actions would be inappropriate. But at the time, when one is caught up in the spirit of the holidays, such things seem not only appropriate, but logical. It’s as if smooching with interns and schmoozing with the president are things I should have been doing all along.
Fortunately, not all my thoughts are so deplorable. I also find myself complimenting some of the people I genuinely enjoy working with. There’s something about the holiday season that forces you to search your soul for nice things to say—especially if someone catches you off guard and says something nice to you first. Unfortunately, I don’t always have something nice to say about some of the people I work with. Which makes me really appreciate the people I can say something nice about.
All too often, I receive a compliment and find myself responding with something innocuous like, “Thank you, Earl. I enjoyed working with you on that direct mail piece, also.” And while I suppose that’s better than nothing, I enjoy it much more when I can say sincerely, “You’re a good person, Fred. I’m glad we work together.”
Of course, I then find myself wondering why I never complimented that particular person during the course of the year.
So in orde
r to safeguard against career-ending miscues at the holiday party—and at the same time, to help encourage appropriate behavior throughout the rest of the year—I have two suggestions. Use these to guide your actions during the holiday season and throughout the year:
1. If it seems inappropriate in July, it’s probably still inappropriate in December. White beards and Santa suits notwithstanding, you should keep your hands out of your coworker’s stockings.
2. If it seems appropriate during the holidays, you should probably try doing it throughout the rest of the year. I appreciate it when someone tells me at the holiday party that they like working with me. But my best friends are the ones who have a kind word to say in the dog days of July or August.
Follow these two rules of thumb, and you’ll come to be known as a decent and much valued coworker. You’ll also get invited to a lot more holiday parties.
The Difference Between Men and Women
My sister called me for advice. She said “hello” to a guy at work, and now he keeps pestering her for a date. “I was just being friendly,” she said.
“That’s the difference between men and women,” I told her. “Women are friendly; men are obsessed.”
I hate to sound so cynical, but it’s true. Many otherwise intelligent and worldly women don’t seem to understand that if you make eye contact with a guy, he thinks you want to sleep with him. If you smile at him, he thinks you really want to sleep with him. And if you actually talk to him or laugh at one of his jokes... you don’t want to know what he’s thinking.
It might sound like you’re just telling him that you want to use the copier. Or that he has mustard on his chin. Or maybe you’re just a nice person who believes in saying “hello” to people when you see them. It doesn’t matter. No matter how innocent your comment might seem to you, the guy will automatically analyze the encounter in terms of where you stand on the scale of desire to sleep with him.
Unfortunately, none of us are above this sort of thinking. I pride myself on being aware of this difference between men and women, yet when a coworker smiled at me recently, I sensed her desire and made a mental note to stay away from her in the future. I don’t need that kind of trouble.
None of this is meant to imply that men should change. That’s a moot point anyway. We fear change and are, for the most part, incapable of it. Nor should women change. But the next time you see a guy, you might want to start off with this disclaimer: “In no way does what I’m about to say imply that I have any desire whatsoever to sleep with you. I’m just being friendly.” After that, it should be safe to go ahead and say “hello.” He may still think you want to sleep with him, but he’ll be so confused that you might actually be able to have a normal conversation while you’re waiting to use the copier.
New Year’s Resolutions
I don’t make resolutions on New Year’s Eve anymore.
Now before you categorize me as a New Year’s “Scrooge,” allow me to add that it’s not because I think resolutions are a bad thing. For the most part, I think they may be a good thing. They give people goals, and goals help us live our lives in an orderly fashion.
But we also need hope, and my concern is that too many goals—especially goals in the form of New Year’s resolutions—can have a bad effect on hope.
All too often, we rush blindly from one goal to another or from one project to another without really examining what we’re doing. I’ve been guilty of this on more than one occasion. I love to take on household projects—paint the living room, build some new shelves in the basement, refinish that old table—all of which give me some degree of pleasure and satisfaction, but all of which, if taken on in quick succession, ultimately serve as distractions and diversions from our real purpose here.
What is our real purpose here? I won’t pretend to be able to answer that question. Our purpose—and whatever meaning there is to our lives—is something we have to discover for ourselves. Some think meaning comes through the pursuit of knowledge. Others feel art and self expression hold the meaning of life. Still others feel that to leave behind a healthy, well-adjusted child is no small feat.
Whatever the meaning of life may be, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to do with a fresh coat of paint on the living room wall. Not, as I said, that there’s anything wrong with doing a little home improvement—I personally find it relaxing at times—but we have to guard against letting such projects take on lives of their own.
So I don’t make resolutions any more. I have enough things I’m trying to do in my life without putting more pressure on myself. Instead, what I do is to sit down sometime before the end of the year—and ideally, a few times during the year, too—and think about why I’m here and what I’m doing with my life. I figure that if I keep working on home improvements, I’m eventually going to have a pretty nice house. When that time comes, I want to make sure there’s a pretty nice human being to occupy that house.
The Rose Parade
My father has lived in southern California for many years. He tells me the best time to be in southern California is on New Year’s Day. And the best place to be is in Pasadena watching the Rose Parade.
There may be something to what he says. Some demographers have theorized that the Rose Parade may single-handedly be responsible for an influx on the order of 100,000 people into southern California every year. It seems that a lot of people all over the country watch the Rose Parade (and later in the day, the Rose Bowl football game) on television, and that gives them the final impetus to say, “The hell with the cold and the snow and the wind; California here I come.” This seems to happen especially with fans of Big Ten teams—people who just happen to be watching the Rose Parade from the frigid environs of places like Michigan, Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
I’ve watched the Rose Parade on television, but I’ve never seen it in person. I doubt if I’ll ever bother. However, on more than one occasion, I’ve looked at apartments along the parade route on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. That’s an experience.
If you’ve only watched the Rose Parade on television, you may not have an appreciation for what a grand thoroughfare Orange Grove Boulevard is. Orange Grove Boulevard is a wide street lined on both sides with palm trees. It’s also lined with some multi-million dollar homes and some pretty nice luxury apartments—many of which provide spectacular views of the sun setting over downtown Los Angeles.
I first looked at an apartment on Orange Grove Boulevard (and first learned that I would never be able to afford such an apartment) in 1980. I had just graduated from college, and I had come to Los Angeles to look for a job. I sent out dozens of resumes but received only a handful of interviews—and no job offers. It was very frustrating. It was only later that I learned that, as a recent graduate with only a bachelors degree in business administration, I had no business applying for jobs like Vice President of Finance, Treasurer, or Controller.
What I did have was lots of time to kill. So one day, while driving from downtown Los Angeles back to my father’s house, I saw a sign saying “apartment for rent” on Orange Grove Boulevard. I decided to stop and look.
The apartment was open so I went in and looked around. To put it bluntly, it was the most spectacular apartment I had ever seen. The rooms were huge. And there was one long wall—it had to be 40 feet long—with a full-length picture window facing west, overlooking a pool, and beyond that, downtown Los Angeles and the Hollywood hills. There were also some guys there doing some painting. I asked them about the rent. They told me it was $700 a month.
That may not seem terribly outrageous now. But this was 1980. What were you paying for rent back then? I was paying $175 a month for an apartment in Illinois. And that included all my utilities!
I eventually gave up on finding a job in Los Angeles and went back to Illinois where I finally found my first job (which paid a whopping $12,000 per year!). But as fate would have it, I ended up with a job in Los Angeles in 1987. I moved out there with my wife, who was pregnan
t at the time, and we settled into a little apartment east of Pasadena.
We were not particularly pleased with our accommodations, but it was all we could afford at the time. We stuck it out for a year there, my wife had our daughter, and we came to a crucial moment in our lives when we had to decide whether we would stay in southern California or move back to the Midwest.
This was not a simple process. And not one that could be resolved by taking in the Rose Parade. We mulled this decision over for several weeks.
During that time, we decided to look at other accommodations. If we stayed in southern California, we were not going to stay in our apartment. We quickly realized that it would be years before we could afford a house in the Los Angeles area (a two bedroom fixer-upper with a small lot was going for about ten times my salary at the time), so we started looking at other apartments.
And lo and behold, I found myself on Orange Grove Boulevard again. It also just so happened that the same apartment I had looked at in 1980 was again vacant. I couldn’t resist looking at it—this time with my wife and infant daughter in tow. It was still spectacular. It had also gone up in price—to $1,700 per month.
We went on down the street to another apartment building, still on Orange Grove Boulevard, but slightly more modest for the vicinity. The second apartment we looked at was also very large and well appointed. It lacked the spectacular view, but it was also $600 less per month. My wife and I liked it so much, we started talking about what we would have to do to be able to afford an $1,100 per month rent payment. We realized we could pull it off, but that it would take a lot of sacrifice and hard work. We’d have to take the money we were putting into savings and put it toward rent. My wife would have to go to work sooner than she planned, which meant finding day care for our daughter. In the meantime, I could do some freelance work evenings and weekends.