Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I’ve come up with this explanation: people change. It’s as uninteresting as that. People change.

  Who am I? Oh, yes: I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like fiction, country music, or cilantro. We use these defining truths to help us stay in the lines of ourselves. We think we have to hold on to these labels, we feel comfortable holding on to these labels, but it turns out the labels are removable, you can peel them right off. Okay then, change of plans: I’m the kind of person who likes nonfiction and fiction, and used to not like cilantro but now likes it, but still doesn’t care for country music.

  I want to tell you something. And this is 100 percent nonfiction true. I have been struggling with this Update entry for the past several weeks. Today, July 15, 2004, is the last day that I can add anything new to this book before the designers start killing me. Inbetween writing and stressing this morning, I checked my e-mail. I had been trying to track down a fellow who some years ago wrote to tell me that he’d found a copy of a short essay of mine in the trash at our neighborhood Kinko’s and enjoyed it, whatever. We had e-mailed back and forth for a while, but eventually went on our merry cyber ways. Themes in that essay turned out to be stepping stones to the conception of this book, and, being a sucker for serendipity and bringing things full circle, I thought it might be interesting to reconnect with him now, but my attempts were in vain. About two hours ago, he turned up in my in-box. At the end of his delightful e-mail he signed off with a quote. It is the most perfect summation of everything I’ve tried to say on this subject of not liking and now liking fiction: I have contradicted myself, in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. So thank you, Marcel Duchamp. And thank you, Jeffrey Rawwin.

  V

  VAN GOGH PRINTS

  I was writing at the coffeehouse when in struts a young guy, twentyish, peddling poorly framed Van Gogh prints. He had a large box of them, dozens of these two-by-three-foot, faux-gold-framed, ready-to-hang posters. They looked awful. To make matters worse, he was rambling on about how if he sold just a few more, he’d be set with beer money for the week. The whole scene was unbearable. This was, after all, Van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh. Starry Night Vincent van Gogh. Truth splendor torment pain pain pain paint Van Gogh. Who now, a century and change later, has emerged on the other side of fame and glory, the side where your work is so universally known and accepted that it turns up on key chains, and hand towels, and prints being hawked door to door by a fellow who’s a six-pack away from being passed out on the couch. It seems not even an artist like Vincent van Gogh is exempt from the rule that in time, the sublime is reduced to Cheez Whiz.

  Table

  CULTURAL COMING-OF-AGE

  How I always thought it was pronounced How the sophisticated apparently pronounce it

  Van Go Van Gogk

  Prowst Proost

  Budapest Budapesh

  W

  WABI-SABI

  I was noticing how more and more I was feeling both happy (actually, content) and sad at the same time. Happiness always seemed to be tinged with sadness, and, strangely, vice versa. I started asking around if anyone knew a word that meant happy and sad at the same time. People offered up melancholy, but that wasn’t it—that’s more sad than happy. And no, it’s not bittersweet, either. I’m talking about complete happiness and complete sadness simultaneously, the way Van Morrison’s music makes you feel, let’s say. Maybe it’s 55 percent happy, 45 percent sweet/sad. It’s the way you feel when you run into a friend from grammar school, someone you haven’t seen in twenty years, and it turns out he is no longer nine years old, he’s a grown-up telling you about his work, he is a balding, padded stand-in, but it’s so fantastic to see him, this generational ally you were shuffled along with from grade to grade, this person who once made up a significant percent of your world because back then your world was only ten miles wide and thirty kids deep, and as you hug good-bye—it was so great to see you, so amazing, okay you too, take care—you know that this chance encounter may very well constitute your one and only reunion.

  It is feeling content, peaceful, hyper-aware of loss, in awe, perfectly, gently happy/sad. What is the word?

  I continued probing friends, even strangers, for a few weeks; eventually I got the hint that no one really felt this way, and anyway, there didn’t seem to be a word for it, so I stopped asking/searching.

  A couple months later, I picked up Utne Reader magazine. I was drawn to the cover story about wabi-something. It reminded me of the word wasabi, which I like, so I bought the issue. Here’s what I found:

  SABI: a mood—often expressed through literature—of attentive melancholy.

  WABI: a cozier, more object-centered aesthetic of less as more.

  WABI-SABI: As a single idea, wabi-sabi fuses two moods seamlessly: a sigh of slightly bittersweet contentment, awareness of the transience of earthly things, and a resigned pleasure in simple things that bear the marks of that transience.

  This was it. This was exactly it. The word/concept I had been searching for had been there all along, tucked away in twelfth-century Japanese culture, waiting patiently for my straight-ahead gaze to shit a bit eastward.

  See also: Lucky

  From baby book. “At four years and five months Amy said: ‘I am very sad and very happy. I am sad because I miss Grandma. That’s why I don’t want to grow up because I won’t have a grandma. It’s not like when you’re little. I’m happy because I have so many friends.’ ”

  Waking

  When I wake up in the morning, my mind slowly reels in the hard facts that transfer me from subconscious to conscious: I am in bed. That is my husband’s leg. I ate too much dip last night. My necklace is still on. I am upset at L. The baby is awake.

  WALLET, FORGOTTEN

  I was in the air, on my way to New York, when I realized I’d left my wallet at home. How would I get from the airport to my hotel? I panicked and cried and panicked and cried, and then mustered up the courage to ask the woman next to me if I could borrow some money. (I’m an honest person—I will pay you back, I promise. I know this is weird, I’m so sorry to bother you.) She said yes. We got to talking. It turned out she was the mother of a work colleague.

  WALLET, STOLEN

  I was at the local library picking out books with the kids. We were having a good time. I took them to the bathroom with me and put my wallet on top of the toilet-paper dispenser. A minute later, outside the bathroom, I realized I’d left it there. Too late—the wallet was gone. I was surprised; stealing a wallet at a place where people worship books seems like a disconnect, sacrilegious.

  Justin, for the first time ever, had decided to bring his new wallet with him that morning. It was a birthday present from his aunt, and it contained two dollars, both of which were from the Tooth Fairy. When I flipped out about my stolen wallet, he said, It’s okay, Mom—you can have mine.

  WEALTHY

  I was at the home of an insanely wealthy individual. While standing by his shiny grand piano, it became evident that the thing that separates the insanely wealthy from the rest of us is that the insanely wealthy enlarge all their photographs. That’s it right there. Every photo on his mantel and coffee table was an eight-by-ten—not the standard three-by-five, or your occasional five-by-seven—I’m saying, eight-by-ten, across the board. There were dozens of them. There was the Here I am with the President eight-by-ten, and the Here I am with Nelson Mandela eight-by-ten. But even the requisite grandkids naked in the backyard shots were blown up and thoughtfully framed. The rest of us, on the other hand, make do with our fridge frame magnets; our five-by-seven frames from Target; our flock of cheap, bland frames we seem to have been born with.

  WEATHER, ASKING ABOUT THE

  At the doctor’s office, the receptionist was checking me in and asked, So, is it still snowing out there? As if she had been locked up for days. As if she was relying on the arrival of us lucky, nomadic patients to bring her the news of the streets.

  WHITE SOCK

  A white sock somehow became affixed t
o our garage door. Every time the garage door went up, so did the little white sock. I began to look forward to watching the sock rise up, and go down; it was an odd, daily, 100 percent cotton beacon of joy. And while I knew the sock would ultimately, inevitably, unattach itself, when that day came, and no sock rose up with the garage door, I was disheartened.

  WINKING

  It takes a lot of confidence to wink at someone.

  WOMAN ACROSS THE HALL

  I can’t remember the name of the eighty-something-year-old woman who lived in the apartment across the hall when I was twenty-three and living in San Francisco. She was so nice. She often let homemade cookies with quaintly formal notes at my door.

  WOMAN AT COFFEEHOUSE

  I was trying to get some writing done at the coffeehouse. An older woman—maybe she was in her late seventies—asked me what I was working on. This kind of bugged me. First of all, I have trouble with that question—that’s my own thing, I know, but I don’t know how to answer it without sounding either pretentious (if I try to accurately explain it, really get into it) or ridiculously inarticulate (if I try to give them the gist while keeping it ambiguous). And besides, people don’t really want an answer answer, they want a categorical answer: Essay. Article. Novel.

  With the older woman, I opted for an evasive (conversation-stopping) answer, and immediately felt guilty for not being friendlier, more chatty; clearly, the woman was lonely, for God’s sake. So when I got up to go to the bathroom some minutes later, I stopped at her table to say hi. She seized upon this gesture and proceeded to tell me all her ailments. I kept saying, Oh, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry to hear that, and I was, but all the while I felt insincere and useless. I finally mumbled something about getting back to work, and when the older woman got up to leave later, I didn’t even look up.

  WORD OF THE DAY

  I was taking a bath. Paris was about to practice violin, and I said, Why don’t you practice in here, keep me company? After a few minutes of listening to her I said, Oh, Paris, it sounds so beautiful in here, the acoustics are perfect. Then, because the teaching moment seemed too good to pass up, this tangible example of the word acoustics, I tried to define it for her. But then I quickly realized, Who am I kidding, this is way too complicated a concept, I’m rambling, she has no idea what I’m saying, so I let it go. When she was done practicing, I went to go get dressed. In my closet I have a word-of-the-day calendar, and I saw that it was still on yesterday’s date. I tore off the page. Today’s word: acoustics.

  See also: Meaning

  American Heritage Dictionary Word-a-Day Calendar, 2003.

  WORDPLAYS

  I am bewitched by the perfection of the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO)’s bumper sticker: PLAYSOCCER.

  Similarly, when Paul Newman ventured out into the cookie market with his Fig Newmans, I thought, Well, regardless of how they taste, I must support this new product because the name is genius. I could see them brainstorming, sitting around a conference table with a huge pad of paper and a thick black marker, and everyone throwing out salad dressing ideas. How about Tarragon and Honey Mustard? How about Soy Miso? And one guy goes, Hey, wouldn’t it be funny to do a cookie called Fig Newmans? And everyone laughs, ha-ha, Clever name, but we make salad dressing, not cookies, let’s move on, next idea. And then this guy, who is beside himself over having come up with such a brilliant name, decides to write a memo to Mr. Paul Newman himself, what the hell, and he works on a draft of this letter for days, finally sends it off (after agonizing over which stamp at the post office: flag design or Emily Brontë; went with the flag), and then three days later—just three days!—he gets an e-mail from Paul himself. He and Joanne love the idea. (Joanne!) I like to think this is how Fig Newmans were born.

  See also: Amy Rosenthal; E; Encyclopedia Spine; Sign at 7-Eleven

  WORDS THAT LOOK SIMILAR

  WOW

  The word WOW hangs on the back wall of my studio office. I bought the three jumbo letters years ago, at an antique shop; they were salvaged from an old Woolworth’s sign. When I picture my studio, I picture that big red exclamation.

  Shortly after September II, Jason spent the afternoon painting in the studio. When he emerged at suppertime, I asked if I could go see. I took one step into the studio and was blown away. The painting was magnificent—colorful, throbbing, alive, shattering. I pointed to the number stenciled in black down the side. The ZIP code of the World Trade Center, he said. Yes, of course.

  I stood back a bit to take it all in. Something looked different … What’s diff—Oh, okay, I see, there’s a letter missing from my back wall. There it is, on the floor. He took down the first W while he was painting to make room for his oversized canvas. I knew something was different. And wait a second, that’s eerie—the wall has had a change of heart; it, too, has sobered up. It’s now saying the same thing the painting is: OW.

  WRECK

  I have this strange sensation when I turn on a light and the bulb—fizzle, spark—goes out. My split-second reaction is, Wait, no, I just turned the light on wrong, let me do it again, I’m sure the light will work. I want a do-over. Of course, I know this is nonsense. The light is out. And that is that. I’m just saying.

  A couple summers ago, we journeyed to Greece. One afternoon we took an island boat ride to a tiny patch of beach surrounded by huge jagged cliffs. The main attraction, however, wasn’t the landscape itself, but a shipwreck, a large, old rusty boat plopped sideways on the sand.

  A picture of that shipwreck hung in my sparse European bedroom, so I had looked at this photo for days. There are no people in the photo, just the beach and the ship. So I was shocked to find, as our tourist boat dropped anchor at the shore, hordes of visitors climbing aboard and running around the ship. We didn’t go over to the shipwreck right away; we stood there and tried to consciously suck in the beauty and the remoteness. We felt, despite our extreme southern latitude, on top of the world.

  The kids were eager to explore the wreck. From the first rickety crooked ladder, I realized that this ship was not the world’s safest toy. There were tons of kids running around the ship, but this didn’t comfort me as much as I wished it would. My heartbeat increased with each creak. Jason was down below on the sand, watching us through the lens of his spiffy new digital camera. All I could think about was rounding up the kids and getting the hell off the boat.

  We soon found ourselves on one of the ship’s gangways. This particular stretch had a few planks missing. Looking down through the hole, I saw sand where the bottom of the ship would have been, about fifteen feet below. The gap was no more than one foot wide, so the kids could easily jump across it; for me it was just a big step. Justin went first and jumped. I waited for Miles to go—he was right in front of me, his shirtless back against my tummy. Suddenly he spotted a little Greek girl he had played with at the local taverna a couple nights before. I was saying yes, sweetie, I see her, yes as he was simultaneously pointing ahead and turning around to make sure I heard him. I remember feeling rather impatient because I just wanted to get on with it, to cross over this hole. Yes, I see the girl, now on with it. And with that, Miles was gone. He slipped right through.

  To be honest, my first emotion was sort of annoyance-disbelief-anger, like the what are you doing?! reaction you might have upon discovering your toddler has emptied the entire bottle of shampoo into the tub. I couldn’t believe he had just let himself fall through the crack. Why did you do that? I’m so mad at you for doing that! That was the first millisecond. The second millisecond was, Oh my God, he has just fallen from the top of the ship to the bottom. I screamed his name. He was screaming mine, Mommy Mommy Mommy! I’m coming, Miles, I’m coming.

  I scooped up his light little body and held him, scared to even look at what physical harm had come to him. There was lots of blood, but I sensed instinctively that he wasn’t seriously injured. Jason arrived. We ran to the home base—our boat—and they directed us to the captain. By now I could see he had a gouge
the entire length of his forearm, but it was just one cut. We counted our blessings. One, two, three, a million.

  Days later Miles and I were still talking about the event. We’d look at each other and know what the other was thinking. I’m thinking about it. Me, too. In fact, I couldn’t stop looking at him. I was enamored with him. My Miles, you’re here. Look at you. I’m so happy you’re here. We got so very, very lucky. You’re here.

  I saw my child slip away from me. That’s what he did. He literally just—there one minute, not there the next—slipped away. I saw, with front-row-seat clarity, just how quickly, randomly, and mercilessly your child can be taken away.

  Back in the days when children were allowed to sit in the front seat, I used to tease my mom that throwing her arm out in front of me when she had to abruptly stop the car wouldn’t do squat. Nonetheless, there would go her arm, landing an inch from my face at about chin level. Of course, now I understand; in fact, that’s pretty much how I’d like to escort my kids through the world, with my arm extended, shielding them, lifting it only when I am sure the coast is clear.

  Miles slipped away. Then he came back. But now I know, in the saddest, most awful place my heart can imagine, that sometimes when the light goes out, it’s just out.