No wonder we never get ahead, someone pointed out to me recently after I complained that our current income is limiting our house remodeling: we live slow lives.
In fact by some standards we live very slow lives. I commute by bike when, during these cold months, I could drive home in the time it takes me to change into my warm biking clothes. I limit work-related tasks that cut into evenings at home. M takes only minimal out-of-home employment. I prefer to preserve my summers off. We resist too many evenings away from home. We’re trying to turn off the computer by 8:30 at night.
Keeping things slow, however, hasn’t dissuaded me from running a List: Put in new windows in the space of our future kitchen; build the future kitchen; re-floor our downstairs (and hey, why not the upstairs, too); turn the old kitchen space into a study; renovate the downstairs bathroom; build a deck/balcony; add a porch roof or two; develop our own water supply system; install a central vacuum; buy a Subaru, Jeep, minivan, shotgun, miter saw, new computer; and I’m only getting started. It’s a hopeful yet depressing endeavor, the List, since just saving towards projects is a long-term project in itself.
But while our pace of life is certainly stunting our financial growth and house metamorphicating, slowness allows a certain accepting of the “fierce urgency of now” (I Have a Dream): Playing with and reading to N (for weeks some afternoons, it seems); singing with ourselves and a band; occasional writing; gardening; going to bed at a reasonable hour; eating home-grown food made from scratch; sitting in front of the toasty wood stove. And there are always free projects to do around the house, for when I’m needing tangible productivity.
I can only try to keep my dreams balanced between the part of me that wants to fix up the house at gut-wrenching speed and the other parts of my rich life that do not afford financial progress yet are incontrovertibly priceless.
If you read the King James Version of the Bible–and of course you do, if you’re concerned about the misinterpretations offered by, say the NRSV–you are no stranger to the fact of unicorns in days of yore.
I also searched the Bible for cyclops, but to no avail.
And while I’m on the subject of animals, and since the previous post referred to my dear Canela, I’ll just say that the dog-narrated book The Art of Racing in the Rain, which I quite happily reshelved after reading only several short chapters of its shallow philosophical cuteness (“Let me tell you this: the Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the world!“), has made me feel a special kinship to our mutt, for no particular reason other than it made me realize that she’s always excited to see and greet me, the alpha male, which is something special after dwelling all day in my professional world of seventh-grade moodiness.
Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi has indeed changed my outlook on life, through beautiful fiction.
But don’t take my word for it: “This is a story that will make you believe in God,” Pi notes; the Los Angeles Times Book Review says on the book’s cover, “A story to make you believe in the soul-searching power of fiction”; the lone reader goodbadi adds, “Pretty sharp poke at religion.”
Indeed, this story does just what I think makes a sweet read also great: in its own entity it enacts exactly that which it demolishes by its self enactment, in this case religion.
Pi tells a fabulous tale, one that his skeptics at the end of the novel embrace as True over an alternative explanation. At the same time, throughout the book Pi professes the beauty of his three religions–Judaism, Islam, and Christianity–all of which he accepts as relevant and True. This is exactly what the readers of this book must do, too: even though we ultimately know that nothing in Martel’s novel actually happened, we find it necessary to choose what story or stories–if any–we believe.
The bigger idea, then, is that choosing a religion is a mere selecting of a beautiful tale (or, as in Pi’s case, several tales) to be accepted as True whether or not factual reality is accommodating. Many ardent believers, for example, include Genesis 6:4 in their “True” religious stories: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went to the daughters of the human beings and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” Does this mythologically bizarre story’s presence in sacred text make it true or True, story or Story?
Martel makes his pretty sharp poke at religion by showing appreciation for story–and then leaving it at that. Factual reality is not necessary that which is True. Lower-case story does not beat out Story, whether or not the Story really happened.
Ahhh, but I haven’t described yet my new outlook. See, Pi’s Story isn’t for the meek hearted or solely religious, and it is in this aspect my life has been reformed. Pi survives 227 days in a small lifeboat with a Bengal tiger (that in itself is a great psychological study) by declaring himself the alpha male, which has, simply put, inspired me to think of myself as the alpha male.
I can’t really help it; the role has rather fallen into my lap. Our puppy, as unruly and disobedient and pesky as she is, obeys me more than anyone. Furthermore, my basketball skills simply tear up, especially when I play my seventh grade, asthmatic students the occasional game of knock-out. And finally, there are days when I just know I could through my own bicycle navigational prowess keep the wind at my back (although, admittedly, I probably wouldn’t get home before taking the long way around the world). Indeed, how can I possibly avoid facing an alpha male complex in light of this Truth?
And that, my friends, is beautiful and True in its own special way.
Whereas N’s default modus operandi is “everything is exciting,” variations from “what’s supposed to be” require, for M and me, a working to keep ourselves functional and positive. Monday we had some practice.
The first impediment to proper preparation for our twelve-hour drive to visit M’s sister’s family was the partially-hosted-by-us Christmas partying that lasted from Friday night until Sunday night. Add to that my groggy recovery from my weekend’s perpetual headaches and sweaty chills, and my lingering sore throat, and something just had to fall through the cracks. Like more than one shirt with long sleeves and a second pair of jeans (and we were going to Illinois in winter, for crying out loud), the children’s audio books M had so carefully selected from the library, and probably other things I haven’t quite figured out yet.
Due to our shoddy preparation, we couldn’t even really leave, it seemed for a while. I let us sleep in past our 5:30am departure time preference because I thought my throat still hurt too bad to sit in the car all day, but after waking up I changed my mind.
“We’ll be off by around 9:00,” I told M’s sister when I called. “Don’t worry about waiting up for us tonight, though, since we may not get there until ten or eleven o’clock, with stops and all.”
And all.
Around 9:30 we pulled out of our driveway, but two miles down the road, I thought, “I didn’t turn off the water to the outside faucet. It’ll freeze for sure.” We drove home.
At 9:38 we again left, but three miles down the road, M suddenly realized that we’d left N’s imperative sippy cup and a bag of necessary cookies on the dining room table. We drove home.
At 9:50 we finally left for good.
“You did check to see that stove was off, right?” I asked M. She just glared at me.
And really, the drive went great, aside from the occasional misery brought on by my swallowing or M’s realization about the missing audio books. N was mostly contented:
We crossed several bridges, which N loved. She enthusiastically counted them:
However, when I was driving along after dark a noise we’d heard earlier in the day resurfaced in fuller force. We phoned our mechanic on vacation in Arizona, and from our description, he wasn’t sure it would be safe to carry on.
The gas station attendant said “Hello” but didn’t look up from texting when I walked in, so I walked over to the counter and coughed into my sleeve.
He glanced at me.
“Are there any late-night mechanics around here?” I asked.
“Car trouble?”
“Thunk-thunk.”
“It might be a loose tire belt. That happens to people a lot and they usually think it’s something different. But no, I don’t know of any mechanics open this late.”
In the car we decided to park outside of Motel 6 and make some more calls. I borrowed a phone book from the receptionist, but we had no luck with mechanics or car rentals. We would just have to wait until morning, or brave the two more hours to M’s sister’s place in the dark and cold with no satisfactory back up plan.
The adjacent “showclub” made Motel 6 quite unappealing, so we drove next door to its equal, Super 8, from which the club was still visible across the trucks in the parking lot.
After checking in I told M, “I don’t know if they serve breakfast, but I wouldn’t even eat a pre-wrapped Pop-Tart from that office.”
“If you were hungry, you would,” she said.
We woke N up from her car seat slumber and settled in. As crummy as the office had appeared to me, the room wasn’t bad, really, even though we couldn’t figure out how to turn half the lights on. (Later we realized they were slow-to-glow bulbs, so we just hadn’t been patient enough with the switches.)
In the morning a nearby mechanic checked over the car and found nothing wrong, so we continued on our way, with no problems.
Right now, though, a second mechanic is checking over and tuning up the car. He thinks the culprit was an oily spark plug wire or something like that. We’re taking his word for it–we don’t want to be stranded when we drive home on New Year’s Day.
But if we are, we’ll make it fun…as we’ve practiced.
For four hours I slept, Saturday, trying to shake off gripping headaches, chills and an oncoming sore throat.
After I dragged myself downstairs, N (accompanied by her grandparents) reenacted for me our Christmas caroling routine from the night before: “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night,” then the handover of a container of (supposedly) “apricot and strawberry jam,” and finally “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”
Earlier in the day she had opened the first portion of her gifts, and she was still wearing her yellow princess dress, and she sang so very clearly in spite of not knowing most of the words, her brow furrowed with thorough absorption.
Here’s the birthday girl in her birthday play clothes. (Recognize the hampers?)
My siblings are going to tire of my posting every Youtube video they send me…but I think I’ll download this one, too, and show it to my students to review hyperbole–and maybe irony, too, since the dude’s complaining about complainers.
Hoping to tone down the Christmas story’s happiness hype that is probably blown way out of proportion, I decided to write a “subcant” for what has been one of N’s favorite songs for quite some time. She helped me by singing the original tune so I could figure out some of the back story text and melody (neither of which is decipherable here):
