A Life of Extremes

This past week, my roommate came home from an evening spent with a mutual friend, looking rather nervous.  “Your friend is crazy,” she said, in that way we have of disassociating ourselves with someone who has done something insane or embarrassing.  “She really is crazy.  And I’m sorry about the video that will appear on Facebook later this week.”  Naturally, this comment sent me directly to Facebook to search.  I found the video, showing my redheaded comrade standing in a small lighted area surrounded by darkness.  Lindsay had a guilty expression that she wears so well and so often.  I watched, my eyes rolling themselves, as she removed her coat, shivered and dithered for a while, and finally jumped into a pitch-black, sub-freezing pond with all her clothes still on. 

Now, the action didn’t surprise me.  Lindsay has been prone to do these things for years.  We met and became friends when she started singing songs on a street tour of London and I joined in.  This impulsive show was uncommon for me, but not, I soon learned, for her.  She’s the kind of person who leaps and dances rather than walks, who has ten facial expressions per emotion, who will throw her arms around me when she sees me and heft me into the air in her delight.  Lindsay has a dozen stories such as the one I describe above.  When we were in school together, she was prone to exploring off-limit areas like old basements and attics, and she had a good relationship with campus security from being caught so many times.  Last year she decided she wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail and spent a vast amount of money on equipment, only to decide after half a day that she was bored of hiking.  She took a bus home.  It’s come to the point that my friends and I insist on reviewing all of Lindsay’s decisions, only half-joking when we do.

When I heard of this most recent escapade, at first I was simply exasperated.  Sooner you than me, was the thought, I believe.  A bit later I started to feel anger, the kind of motherly anger you feel when someone you love does something dumb and gets out of it unscathed.  What if there had been something submerged in the water? I thought.  My impression of the pond was that it wasn’t commonly used for swimming.  What if she’d hit her head on the bottom of the dock?  If she hadn’t come up, my roommate Kathryn—who has not known Lindsay long and is inexperienced at restraining her—would have gone in after her, and she is not a strong swimmer, as she says.  More, what if Lindsay had gotten hypothermia?  She had to drive home in those wet clothes.  Of course most of my post-trauma worries were ridiculous, I know.  But even so, I resolved to give my redheaded friend a smack the next time I saw her.

As I considered this, however, I saw in my mind Lindsay’s face, how easily she laughs and how bright her smile is.  This story will be one of many that brings on that laughter in the future, and the laughter of others.  As I’ve said, she has so many of these stories, rich with experiences that I’ll never have.  My reserve and caution hold me back from excitement like this..  Lindsay, though, lives a life of extremes—the coldest water, the roughest terrain, the most thrilling risks, the most intense emotions, the most terrifying excitement.  And though she might run a risk of not getting a chance for those red coils to turn gray, I still think it’s laudable to live that way, fearless and full to the brim.  I admire both the courage that such a life requires and the trust she places in those who surround her, those like myself who, no matter how many times I facepalm, will always be there to drag her out when she gets in too deep.

Charming Snakes

So often when I come to this blog, I don’t really know what it is I want to write about.  I’ll have a certain idea, or I’ll have been touched by an experience, but the subject I want to express does not easily translate to words.  This is why, sometimes, that I procrastinate on posting here.  This kind of writing is not like exploring characters and events in my novels.  This writing is exploring myself, and it’s so much harder.

Take today, for example.  I spent some time this morning transcribing a poem I’d found into one of my journals, a poem written in honor of Rachel Corrie.  Rachel was an American college student who went to Israel in 2003 on a peace mission.  She stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer to keep it from destroying a Palestinian home.  The bulldozer crushed her to death.  The poem I read, written three years later, spoke of everything Rachel had lost in the name of peace—the dreams she had dreamed in the middle of class, the family she might have had—because she wanted to stop the destruction that would “snatch a child from his laughter.”

Rachel and the poem have lingered in my mind all day.  I knew I wanted them to be the subject of my post this evening, but what did I want to say?  Did I want to call out all those who did not act as she did in the name of peace, or did I simply wish to honor Rachel’s courage and mourn her sacrifice?  What could I say to make the tragedy better?  Words are sadly lacking when it comes to this.

Did I want to express my own shame that I never knew about this?  But at the time it happened, I was busy drawing my own doodles in a middle schooler’s notebook, dreaming my own dreams.  Does the normality of American daily life, so all-consuming to our minds, excuse us from our ignorance about the world in general?  Daily life for our fellow man often includes destruction, war, blood, grief, hunger, thirst, and so many other forms of pain with which we in our comfortable homes are unfamiliar.  It’s not that we close our hearts to their suffering—it’s worse.  We close our eyes, pretending that the anguish doesn’t even exist, and never let them touch our hearts in the first place.

Maybe I didn’t want to get quite so deep.  Maybe I wanted, not to close my eyes, but to narrow my gaze.  The poem, then?  Did I want to simply admire the beauty of Fatima Naoot’s words, the concept of snatching a child from laughter, or the secondary, ghostly world of possibility she built around this girl who gave it up before she found it?  Did I want to speak of my jealousy that I can’t write with that level of clarity?  In the end, that’s all I’ve done.  My poetry, my translations from thought to word, are so much weaker.  So much that I can only speak of them in abstract.  I cannot always bring my thoughts to the surface.  They must remain shadows under the water that is my work, influencing what the reader sees but never really coming to light.  Meanwhile a true poet, a true artist, can take the beast by the throat, draw it up out of the water, and show it to others for what it is.  “This is Pain,” they can say, and the readers can look on it in all its ugliness, but without fear, for a poem makes the monsters we see in the darkness of ourselves less horrifying. 

Someday, I hope to be one of those monster-tamers, a snake-charmer, a wrangler of words.  For now, however, I’m just a fisherman, struggling with tangled metaphors and no bait.

Careful What You Wish For

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping.’  To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”  Fred Rogers

A winter storm rolled through Roanoke yesterday and the day before, dumping a level of snow on us that hasn’t been seen in years.  Sixteen inches, at least, and deeper in some places, I’m certain. 

At first, I was delighted.  I’ve always liked the snow, and in the past few years I’ve been disappointed that we haven’t had more of it.  Visions of playing out in it, making snowmen, having snowball fights, all danced in my mind, and when the snow started coming down on Wednesday afternoon, I watched with excitement.  I was glad to be leaving work early, and I wasn’t disturbed as the whiteness got thicker.

The excitement began to wane, however, when I had to sweep the snow from my car before I could get on my way.  No worries, I thought, most of it will blow off once I get to the highway.  I was confident, of course, that the highway and the wide avenue on which I live would be in good shape.  What didn’t occur to me is that it would make no sense for plows and salters to be out clearing roads when the snow was still going on.  I didn’t get above thirty miles an hour the entire time I was on the highway, and my alarm only got worse when I reached my avenue. 

Among unpleasant feelings, the dread you feel when you’re stuck on a snowy road, tires spinning, the snow continuing to come down, is one of the worst.  Suddenly the snow doesn’t look as white and pretty anymore.  I remember looking up at the sky, almost black by that point, the streetlights turning the snow a brownish-yellow.  I remember spinning my steering wheel one way and the other, my leg getting sore from pumping the gas, shunting myself forward on my seat as if that would help at all.  Who can I call for help? I thought.  My parents are hours away, and my friends are sick, and my roommate doesn’t have any tools to help me…and in any case, I didn’t want to drag anyone else out into the mess.

In the end, a couple of city workers and some policemen stopped to help—maybe someone passing by had seen me floundering and called them, knowing better than I what to do.  They got me moving again, and the rush of gratitude I felt almost put me in tears.  I was free!

I got stuck once more, on a steeper hill further down the road, but this time I knew I would have help eventually, even if it was just those same workers.  I cursed and struggled again, but the stomach-sinking fear didn’t come back.  In the end, a sweet man pulled over in front of me and gave me a push that let me build up the momentum I needed to get up that last hill.  It remains a truth of my life that in times of trouble, people band together to help one another.  “Look for the helpers,” Mr. Rogers says, and you always find them in difficult times.

I saw them again this morning, when I went out to see if I could dig out my poor car from the piles of snow that had accumulated.  There were at least a dozen people out there, using whatever they could to clear the snow—dustpans, brooms, even small trash cans and garden tools—and not always working on their own cars.  Two of the guys there, one I knew and one I did not, took the shovels my roommate and I had borrowed out of our hands and set to work around my car.  Within twenty minutes I was clear, and they went on to help someone else.  I imagine by the end of today there will be clear avenues in and out of the apartment complex, and not because of anything the landlord had to do.

Seeing everything they'd accomplished, I felt ashamed of myself.  I had wanted this, had hoped for it most of the winter.  But I had not been able to imagine the sheer mass of it, the problem of where to put yet another snowdrift, of the pushing and digging and scraping that would have to be done.  I thought nothing of the water that would be on the road, leaving cars hydroplaning, or of the difficulty posed by people being unable to get to work, or the massive undertaking by the city to get it all clear.  I look at the snow quite differently now, and I’m resolved to be more careful in what I wish for from now on, because while we know getting what we want can hurt us, we don’t always think of how it will influence others.  My other goal is to be one of the helpers, even if it's just in loaning tools or making hot chocolate.  I'm not a child anymore, and I want my thinking to reflect that, in that I consider the well-being of others at the same time I think of my own.

Make It a Short Spark

“Anger is almost always an emotion for people who wish to control others while simultaneously failing to control themselves.”

There has to be a word for that phenomenon you feel when someone else puts into words a thought you’ve frequently had in the past, but never have been able to articulate.  This thought, admirably expressed by Dan Pearce of “Single Dad Laughing”, has been floating around in my head for a few weeks now.  Before I found this quote, it was a formless thought, one that stays beyond the part of your consciousness that speaks in words.  Now, however, I have the tools to really examine it.

I’ve believed for a long time that anger doesn’t do very much good in my day-to-day life.  Most of that comes out of a dislike of confrontation: I just really don’t like to fight with people.  (Maybe my older sister’s at fault—she always used to win the arguments we got into as kids, and so I just stopped trying.)  But I have noticed, especially since getting a service job, that you really do catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. 

For example, in a restaurant the hostess usually takes a lot of flak from the servers.  Keeping servers at the right number of tables is a delicate business—too few and the servers are worried about not making enough money, too many and they’re overwhelmed.  Frequently, when the latter happens, the hostess is blasted by a stressed, irritated server who has sixteen things to do in the next four minutes.  “But you don’t do that,” one of my hostess friends told me recently.  “You’ll just come over quietly and say, please don’t sit me again for a little while.  Not DON’T YOU GIVE ME ANY MORE TABLES FOR A DAMN MINUTE!”

There’s a noticeable difference in the two requests above.  The second just naturally puts your back up, doesn’t it?  Anger is a negative emotion, and when we don’t control it, it generates more negativity.  It does come out of a need to control, a reaction to how much the world is not in our control.  Really, it’s a very natural reaction.  It can be frustrating and frightening to realize how much we are helpless to influence what’s going on around us.  But the fact is that getting angry about it doesn’t really help.

Small disclaimer: I do get angry myself.  I’ve written on this blog not that long ago about how I do sometimes get angry.  In that case, there was no harm done except a jerk realizing a small part of his disrespect for others.  When properly channeled, anger can be a source of positive change, especially if you use it to stand up for yourself.  But it’s a stick of dynamite with the fuse sparking, and we need to be careful where we aim the explosion, so that no innocent bystanders are hurt by the blast.