Month: March 2018

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A Mountain of Choices

I came home from work one day to find I had no kitchen table.

In its place loomed a minor mountain range of paper and glitter glue and washable paint, covering every inch of the wooden surface and possibly a few nearby air molecules to boot. I smiled and shook my head, reading the signs as surely as a billboard.

Missy the Artist had been at work again.

Regular readers of this column will remember our developmentally disabled ward Missy, whose creative impulse can seem somewhat akin to placing pepperoni on a takeout pizza: namely, that if some is good, more is better, placed with as much vigor and energy as possible. But her approach to, say, collage or painting, is actually a bit more subtle than that.

First comes Step One: The Early Deliberation. At this stage, Missy has surveyed the canvas – er, pardon, the sheet of paper – and decided exactly where each element needs to go. If assistance is needed, she will then indicate this sport to my wife Heather with great determination, so that glue may be placed at the proper location, followed by the proper piece of cut-up magazine. Failure to match this precision will be met with a disgusted “Noooo, here!”

“Here?”

“Nooooo! HERE!”

This continues through the first couple of dozen gallery creations. Then, at Missy’s discretion, an unseen line will be crossed and we will enter Step Two: What The Hell.

At this point, precision and planning take a back seat to enthusiasm. The object becomes to create as much art as possible, as though it were going to be made illegal in the next 15 minutes. It’s entirely possible that a stray hand on the table may find itself painted blue and purple, wrapped in glitter tape, and adorned with cutouts from Glamour magazine.

“Lookit! Look!”

The funny thing is, the method seems familiar.

It’s the approach of a sports team as the season gets late, when carefully-applied draft schemes and lineup theories give way to simply surviving the final few games.

It’s the approach of a cast and director when trouble arises on Opening Night, and a solution has to be improvised in real time.

And it’s the approach of so many of us with our Issues of the Moment, whether personal or political. The world is busy, life keeps happening, and at some point, the ideal solution gives way to the pragmatism of getting something done, even if it’s not perfect.

And that’s OK.

There’s an old saying that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” – in other words, that insisting on the absolutely perfect can keep you from seeing something that’s perfect enough. Call it paralysis by analysis, or writer’s block, or gridlock, the end result is the same: frustration that only really lifts when we can take a breath and simply try something. Because not only is “something” better than nothing, it’s often pretty good on its own terms.

When I perform art triage on Mount Missy, sure, some items are too chaotic and tangled to be displayed or stored. But an awful lot survives. Some of it even thrives on a wall or a refrigerator door. And whether its origin was deliberate or frantic, all of it is there to be considered – and some of it, from every stage of creation, is pretty darned fun.

So go ahead. Push on. Make the choice that works. Let the mountain range rise.

And when you’re done, start soaking up some paper towels to clean the table.

Seriously. That glitter glue is stubborn stuff.

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The Wonderful Whirl of Missy

The lights went down. The applause rang out. Opening night of another triumphant show was in the books. Time to get changed, get out and celebrate with the cast.

But first I had to leap in the car and race home. The real celebrity was on her way.

“So did she dance every dance?” I asked the driver as we both helped a smiling, exhausted Missy to the door around 11 o’clock at night.

“Oh, yes,” the driver answered as Missy’s smile grew wider. “She had a GOOD time.”

This is not unusual. Our developmentally disabled ward Missy – who is my age physically, but much younger in mind and spirit – has a social calendar that sometimes leaves me tired just thinking about it. There’s the bowling, of course. The Friday night trips and activities, including dancing whenever she can. At different times, there have been art classes and Bible studies, softball games and out-of-town festivals … just about everything short of red-carpet premieres and dinner at Spago.

Mind you, not every hour of every day is filled. There are plenty of nights spent simply listening to music (at FULL VOLUME) or doing a puzzle or waiting impatiently in the bay window for me to get home from work. But Missy is an extrovert at heart, and it’s not unusual for her to grab a coat and head for the front door as soon as she knows I’m back with the car.

“I wan’ go bowling!”

“I wan’ eat the food!”

“I wan’ goooooo!”

And so, more often than not, we hit the bookstore, or the game store, or the reading group, or even a downtown restaurant that knows us so well, they’ve practically reserved her a table. I’ve lost count of how many people recognized her slight frame, warm smile and massive red purse as we go out and about.

It’s impressive. Hard to keep up with sometimes, but impressive.

And it’s a good reminder to look past assumptions.

We’re not good at that. In fact, we’re pretty awful. A recent MIT study found that false news stories circulate more easily on Twitter than true ones, attracting more interest and prompting more retweets. Facebook users are no stranger to the phenomenon, either, frequently posting items that can be proved false in 30 seconds – if anyone bothers to look.

But why bother? After all, we know what we know. And if something reinforces that belief, well then it must be true, right?

Taken to its extreme, it leads to a life of surface impressions and confirmation bias, whether it’s called the bubble, the echo chamber, or the privileged perspective. It’s an easy way to live, if you can call it living. And it’s a lot like driving with a blindfold – however much fun you may be having, you can hurt a lot of people without ever realizing what you’ve done.

It takes more effort to see what’s really there.

Missy doesn’t hide very much. Heck, she wears her feelings on her sleeve in letters the size of the Hollywood sign. But if someone doesn’t want to look past the disability and the speech difficulties, they’d never see the fuller life beneath.

Facts aren’t a hard thing to find on the internet. But if someone doesn’t dig beneath their favorite headlines, they never see the proverbial “rest of the story” or if there’s even a story at all.

Prejudices and biases are fragile things at their foundation – but only if you bother to push.

Get out. Look closer. Question what you see. There’s always a story worth learning, if you take the time to hear it and not just the version in your own head.

And if you’re after Missy’s story, I sure hope you’ve cleared your calendar. And that you really, really like dancing.

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You Can Set Your Clock By It

Health care can deadlock a Congress. Taxation can set pundits to wrangling. But if you really want to get a room full of people fighting at maximum intensity, there’s nothing quite like an arbitrary tradition.

You know the sort of thing I mean.

“No! We open presents before stockings, not after!”

“What do you mean you don’t use the Oxford comma?”

“I will defend to the death Pluto’s inalienable right to be called a planet.”

Majestic molehills, all of them, and I have summited each of their peaks with an unholy glee to do battle with the incorrigible heretics arrayed against me. But for the greatest level of intensity over the most arbitrary of traditions, it’s really hard to beat Daylight Saving Time.

Our twice-a-year clock fumbling has nothing behind it but history, and a venerable series of mythic justifications. No, it doesn’t help farmers – cows don’t care what time it is. No, it doesn’t save energy – in fact, some studies say it actually uses a little more. And Benjamin Franklin never boosted the concept except as a satire.

So it comes down to “We do it because we’ve always done it.” For some, this might be a sign that we don’t truly need it. But for the truly committed – social media fans, state politicians, and perhaps the hidden space aliens living in the Earth’s mantle – it’s a chance to start two fights: one over whether to stop the clock, and one over where to stop it.

PERSON ONE: “I want to walk my dog after work when it’s still light!”

PERSON TWO: “I don’t want to do my morning bike ride in the dark!”

PERSON ONE: “Oh, just man up and spring back!”

PERSON TWO: “It’s spring forward, you clock abuser!”

PERSON THREE: “Um, I work nights so I don’t really care …”

PERSONS ONE AND TWO: “You stay out of this!”

Each year, the time passes and the debate gets tabled for another few months. Once in a great while, a state will actually vote to freeze the clock (hi, Florida!), but usually it all winds down in muttering and sarcastic suggestions. (“Tell you what – you can have daylight saving as long as we get to move the clocks forward at 4 p.m. on a Friday.”) An opportunity lost, again.

And yet, this too may have its value, for two reasons.

First, if we can actually capture all the heat generated by daylight saving debates over the years, we may have discovered a valuable new energy source.

Second, and more serious, it means we inherently recognize that tradition itself has some value.

Traditions are the stories we tell ourselves. They’re the frame that we set around family experiences to make them our own. They’re the moments that bring people together, whether it’s applauding a fireworks show or singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” They set a rhythm that gives us just a small bit of control over the world around us.

Sure, not every tradition is equally valuable. Some can be outright harmful, especially when pushed on someone who doesn’t want to participate. (No one likes being forced to tell a story.) But the idea has power. And when done right, a tradition can connect people into something bigger than themselves, preparing them to face the world together, tied for a moment to each other and to those who came before.

That’s awe-inspiring.

And even if we all collectively come to our senses and stop the clocks once and for all – you know, actually agree on that great tradition called “time” – we needn’t worry about boredom. There will be other stories, on other days.
Speaking of which – did Pluto get the shaft, or what?

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Unfinished Tales

It’s barely even March and I am already looking ahead to summer.

This is not normal for me. I’m the person who, when given a choice between the blazing hot and the freezing cold, will take the weather that requires a coat, a scarf, and a chorus of “Walking In a Winter Wonderland.” After all, you can bundle up, but there’s only so far you can peel down. And when you’re looking at the chores ahead, snow melts, but grass grows. Right?

I’m not saying I’m a complete polar bear. Spring is when life wakes up, especially life that wears baseball gloves and purple uniforms and has one chance in a hundred of seeing the World Series this year. Fall is the time of great-smelling grills and gorgeous trees that no rake can ever keep up with.

But summer? Really?

As usual, you can blame my addiction to theater. On March 16, the Longmont Theatre Company opens a two-weekend run of “Leaving Iowa,” a show about the iconic Summer Vacation Family Road Trip. And this time around, I’m playing Dad, which means I get to invoke the Ritual Repeated Parental Warning: “Now settle down back there, or I’m pulling this car over!”

But it’s more than that, really. It’s also a story about family ties over the years. About how your perspective changes when you move from child to adult (and not just by moving into the driver’s seat). And especially about how you always think there’s more time to know someone until there suddenly isn’t.

That last one hits home. No matter what the time of year. But for me, maybe especially now.

***

A few weeks ago, many of you saw my column about the recent passing of our 21-year-old cousin Melanie. I know, because so many of you chose to respond and send your sympathies, whether through the mail, online, or in the newspaper itself. It was gratifying, healing, and even a little overwhelming to see how many people cared.

I appreciate it and I thank all of you. It brought a lot of love and warmth to a season that had suddenly become too cold even for me.

As much as I love winter, it’s become a little haunted for us. Mel left us in January. Last year, so did our long-time canine queen, Duchess the Wonder Dog. Four years ago in February, we said goodbye to Grandma Elsie. A few years before that, it was Melanie’s dad Andy – January again. Story upon story, soul upon soul.

Sometimes we had a lot of warning before the final chapter. Sometimes none at all. Always, afterward, there are the feelings of questions not asked, things not done, stories not told. It happens even when you’re close, and if there’s been any distance at all, it only magnifies the lost opportunities.

I once wrote about a folk song called “Kilkelly, Ireland,” where an Irish father and an immigrant son exchange letters across the Atlantic for 30 years. The father is always asking the son to come home to visit, the son never seems to – and by the time he finally is ready to, Dad has already passed on.

There will always be a Kilkelly moment. There will always be one last thing you meant to do or say, because as people, we never go into moments thinking they’ll be the last one. There will always be something more you wanted them to experience, whether it’s to see a great-grandchild arrive or to enter college and begin life.

Living stories don’t end neatly.

At the same time, as a kind person reminded me, they also don’t truly end.

We are all more than just ourselves. We carry pieces of every person we’ve ever loved, every story that ever intersected with our own. They shaped us, influenced us, colored the way we see the world.

And when they leave, that touch remains. We carry a little of their flame.

Their story goes on.

And so, when I mount the stage in a couple of weeks, I won’t do so alone. In fact, I’ll be carrying quite a crowd.

I just hope there’s room for all of us in the station wagon.