Potentially perturbed, I am perhaps primarily pleased: the prohibitive purchase price proposed to us by our proximate proprietor of pleasant, potentially personal property permits my pursuing presently preferable prospects of paternal, professional, and pleasurable pastime priorities.
As Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, “To do nothing, in short, [is] to do everything.”
I’m a creature of recurrence, I guess you could say.
Last week, while I was riding on it, my bicycle seat fell off. My seat post bolt, which holds the seat mounting bracket firmly in place, had snapped.
Thankfully I was only twenty yards from the entrance to my school, so it was no big deal. I declined M’s offer to come pick me up, though; I figured I could just ride home standing up the whole way, which I realized that afternoon was a really bad idea, as my additional leg torque and handlebar tugging would surely, I was sure, result in additional bike damage. I ended up pushing the bike up even small hills–and I was so tired from the constant standing I could barely pedal down them.
This is not the first time this exact sort of seat loss has happened to me, which led my bike mechanic to exonerate me of liability. “It’s not like you’re 250 or 300 pounds,” he said. “It must be a design flaw in your seat post.”
Indeed, a few days before this, I’d noticed my seat was a little wobbly, and had tightened down that very bolt just a bit, to snug things up. I guess the bolt had stretched toward a snapping point, and the additional tightening just speeded up its final demise–which was a scenario exactly like when I first lost my seat a year ago.
Maybe I’ll recognize the symptoms in advance of my next unseating and avoid the whole ordeal (although hopefully there won’t be a next time, since my new seat post is a different design).
But don’t worry: this sort of inconvenient symptomatic forgetfulness doesn’t involve just my bike.
As I commuted in our car between two cross-county schools for last Friday’s faculty inservice day meetings, the car started jerking and bucking. I was certain the front wheels would both fall off within the next eighth of a mile, so I pulled over and hiked the eighth of a mile to a nearby Realtor’s office to call M so she would not panic if the police called to ask why our car had been abandoned.
A mechanical friend was willing to come look at the car after work, which would be three hours later, so I decided to walk a bit farther to Martin’s to use the free wi-fi (I had my school laptop with me).
On the way I stopped at a completely unhelpful Chevrolet dealership. “I saw you standing out there,” a man in the office said. “That’s the Z– family estate up that driveway where you parked. Both Z and his wife are passed, but that’s their land.”
Once at Martin’s, I realized that towing might be inevitable even if I did inconvenience my friend to come diagnose the problem, and so using the laptop (I love Gmail) I called around and found someone whose rollback was only twenty minutes away and would only charge $65 to carry my car across the county to a repair shop we’ve patronized before.
I read a bit and watched for the truck, which turned out to be a rollback indeed–that was mounted on a large pickup with two very large men already in it. I abandoned all hopes of a comfortable ride in a cool truck, and I certainly didn’t try to buckle any sort of seat belt, considering the man in the middle with whom, along with the truck’s passenger door on the other side of me, I was feeling way too intimately associated. I held my computer bag and laptop up in front of me to act as an airbag, just in case.
“That’s the Zs’ land, up there,” the driver said after we’d loaded the car and were on our way. “I stopped there once to see a grass fire, and they put me to work.”
The man in the middle grunted.
“That’s a ‘79. 354 block,” the driver said a bit later. “Beautiful car.”
“Yes it is,” the other man said.
Then, still later, “Look at that. This truck just passed 350,000 miles. I bought it new in ‘96 for $35,000. That’s a penny a mile. I’d like to know the gas I’ve put in it. Eight miles per gallon.”
I didn’t offer any math advice.
Anyway, to make a long, boring story less long, the mechanic found no problems with our transmission or axles. Whew.
“Let me go home and look at my files,” I said. “I think I remember having this problem before.”
Yup–as my car file showed, that time on a trip a few years ago when I was afraid to drive on because of exactly similar symptoms and we ended up spending the night in a Super 8 to await a nearby garage’s morning opening–a hotel stay that cost us…yep…about $65, if you include the breakfast at Subway the next morning–was caused by what I now know (again) to be leaky camshaft seals.
If only I’d remembered the symptoms from the first time! No wheels were in danger of falling off! I could have saved $65 and a squishy rollback ride!
Oh well! Better luck next time!
Her “gracias” sounds like “da-da” and her Mommy and Daddy both sound like “mama”; here I’d just helped H retrieve her fork, which had found its way onto my plate:
Back in the early days of my adolescence, which hasn’t yet quite dissipated, I listened to a weekly Christian rock radio show called the Saturday Night Express. The DJ rocked the house, man, and I even won two cassettes from him in a drawing, one a compilation of a bunch of non prominent thrash-metal Christian punk bands, and the other a demo from the Rage of Angels which sported an interview with the band and one of my favorite glam songs, “Do You Still Believe in Love?” And I got saved, too, several times.
I also took to attending the Christian rock concerts in the local college’s auditorium. The Newsboys came a few times, before they were really famous. The first time they were amazing: the guitarist ran all over the stage with his tongue hanging out, playing mesmerization itself. By the third time I saw them, though, I was less charmed even in spite of the drummer’s hydraulics setup that turned him upside down, partly since in one song the guitar player–a different guy than before and much more mellow–even ripped into his solo in the wrong key, and I saw the lead singer give him a dirty look.
It was not as dirty, though, as the looks M gives me sometimes when I introduce our band’s songs by telling all the details all wrong, like the time I said the song we were about to sing, which she’d written just after falling in love with me, was about another guy.
I don’t know if it was at that Newsboys performance or maybe the second that I bought one of their tapes and after the show waded through all the other adolescent misfits gathered in the lobby to get all of the band members’ signatures on the tape jacket. One of guys, when I handed him the cover to sign, looked at me a bit quizzically, then scrawled his name. Later I noticed that two of the signatures I’d gotten were identical.
I have since given that album to a boy at my church. I’m pretty sure his family still has a tape player.
When it comes to flattery, though–and it all does have to come to that, since this post is titled as much–one solitary incident at one of those small-town Christian concerts has always stood out to me. In the pitch dark between songs, as I recall, the lead singer had to ask the lights man to give him a little light so he could see what song was next.
“I’m saying that to show you that we’re human, too,” he told the audience, as if… As if I’d thought him otherwise?
I was reminded of this just a couple weekends ago when I took N to a planetarium show. In her presentation, the college student guide–who did an excellent job, really–couldn’t remember the name of a star or constellation or something I can’t remember and had to ask her fellow student for it.
“See, I don’t know everything,” she told the gathered throng, as if…. As if we’d thought her omniscient? As if the predominantly early elementary school aged crowd was hanging on her every word and idolizing her and were now crushed?
Maybe they were; N was in a state of constant marveling at the experience. “Are we actually moving?” she asked me at one point during the afternoon’s short dome film about molecules; later she crawled into my lap.
Of course, neither of these As if… stories is to say I don’t flatter myself, too, mostly by writing about myself on my blog, but whenever else possible, too.
For example, at the planetarium we were seated in front of two people with a child. During a film simulation of the Mars rover landing, one of the adults asked the other, “Is that an animal?”
Is that an animal? I didn’t turn around to flatter myself by thinking out loud, “Umm, it’s a digitally rendered space capsule with fire coming out of its rocket boosters and so it is a piece of technology and not an animal.”
Now, there is a fine line between flattering oneself by fully enjoying one’s excellence and just being critical of others. The previous paragraph makes a fuzzy blur of that line. That part which of it is critical I blame on my college education, which has enabled me to use words like “that part,” “which” and “of it” and during which one of my professors talked a lot about teaching critical thinking. That fall I wrote in a student-newspaper editorial, “I’m afraid I’m becoming a critical person.”
And I have become as much, certainly.
Just think of all I leave unspoken! Such as:
At the doctor’s office last week N was asked three times by the same person in the space of ten extremely patronizing minutes what she did this morning.
In response I didn’t smile sweetly and say, “You asked her this already. Do you have amnesia?”
Then, after N had received four shots she’d heartily resisted, the same person kept saying, “You did great! Now you’re all ready for kindey-garten!”
I again didn’t say out loud, “Actually, she cooperated about as well a chainsaw pinched by the tree it’s cutting down–she made a racket and got stuck anyway. And we’re going to have our schooling at home.”
And after a colleague denounced Obama’s inauguration as “taking away from” MLK Day, I didn’t say, “What? What? Did you really just say that?”
“Actually,” I also didn’t say, “I think MLK in some ways would have been … flattered. No, honored. (Perhaps.)”
Dear Mom and Dad,
You’ve always been kind, loving, and forgiving parents. I expect that in the near and distant future you will still be kind, loving, and forgiving, and still my parents.
Remember D, the bass player in my college bluegrass band? He played an upright bass that, if I remember correctly, cost many thousands of dollars, much more than your lovely red pickup truck cost you.
Well, one day, D was carrying his bass and he accidently bumped it into a stone or bench or flying piece of firewood or something, and at our next practice, he said sheepishly, “I have a new friend,” and he showed us his bass’s dent.
Now, he wouldn’t have needed to make the introduction with such sheepishness, since we were a kind, loving, and forgiving group of young men, albeit not his parents. Besides, it was his bass, not ours. But how much more unnecessary would have been his sheepishness had we been his dear family, especially family commonly infatuated with cutting, splitting, and throwing firewood!
Looking back, I recall that memory of D’s “new friend” with a certain fondness, knowing how way leads on to way (Frost) yet how firewood keeps us toasty in the cold, and knowing too how it is human imperfection which binds all of imperfect humanity to one another and requires a certain willingness to accept imperfection in fellow humanity to foster ties of friendship and, even more so, family.
And so, dear parents, your new friend, sheltered from the rain and future flying firewood by our good friend Mr. Duct Tape:
Love,
Your son
It’s her dreaming of a birthday party, she told M. It’s a thought bubble, above her in bed with red bubbles coming up from her head. The colors are sequins.
“You mean confetti?” M asked her.
“Yes, confetti.”
I’ve been waiting for this morning for quite a while.
One night last week, when a winter weather advisory was in effect, a friend remembered her own middle-school-era sleep-interrupting potential-snow-day excitement.
“I’m still that way,” I said, and it’s true, maybe because I’ve been stuck in seventh grade for eight years now. That night, with the winter weather warnings fluctuating seemingly by the hour, was a restless one for me. I dreamed about snow and a free day and not going anywhere, but to no avail: come morning all was calmly bare.
I did better last night, and didn’t lose (much) sleep over the predicted minuscule snowfall…until around 3:00 a.m. when I looked out the window and saw it. But then I saw some pickup trucks driving down the road at normal speeds, so I kept my excitement in check and had only mild restlessness.
But now a full day stretches out before me: I’m going to make a batch or two of the world’s best pancakes.
This has been one of the most enjoyably relaxing vacations I’ve ever, ever had. I’ve soaked up visiting with people, doing small projects around the house, reading and drawing and just being around the girls, and generally feeling laid back. But since today was my last chance at break, I kicked my butt into gear.
M had taken the girls in the van into town, so I washed all the hard floors, folded and hung laundry, and didn’t think about this evening’s supper which M had asked me to make until I went to town and the grocery store.
As I wolfed down a meager lunch, I decided that taking the key ring with just the car keys–and not also the van keys–would be fine. Of course there was always the chance that M would accidentally lock her key in the van and would need me to rescue her, but since that has never happened, I figured I’d be alright with just the car keys.
It turned out I was, insofar as she didn’t, but my brother-in-law didn’t make out so well. I crossed paths with him in the hardware store, where he was asking for a jimmy-a-long or some such thing to use to break into his van.
“I never even lock the van,” he groaned, “but I did today. And I was having a productive morning, too.”
At the grocery store I found some pork chops cheap but passed up a sweet ice cream deal because chocolate mint chip wasn’t one of the options; on a lark I also snatched a bundle of rotten bananas.
As exciting as each of these developments were, however, the highlight of my day came at the gas station. I’d brought along 27 gallons of gas cans to fill, plus needed to top off the car tank, so I maxed out my credit card’s $100-at-a-time gas purchase limit. As I was grabbing my receipt and turned to re-seat myself, a truck pulled up on the other side of my pump.
I didn’t pay it or its driver any mind, but I heard him bellow, “You know, boy, that your taxes are going up.”
I didn’t know who he was talking to so I ignored him, but by the time I’d lifted the car door handle, he was in full view, just a big, ruddy elderly man unscrewing his gas cap.
He bellowed again, this time directly at me, “Your taxes are going to go up. You’re going to have to pay more taxes.” He didn’t look happy about it.
It doesn’t happen often, in moments like these, that I am able to think of the exactly right thing to say until hours later. Today, however, my second cup of breakfast coffee seemed to help.
“Well,” I smiled politely, “maybe some good will come of that.”
“You must like Obama,” he bellowed.
Now, I admit I like Obama. But I also like the Libertarian Gary Johnson, for whom I voted last year. Go figure, how I can prefer two leaders of such different political persuasions; I guess it means I’m open minded, whatever that means, or maybe severely fickle (my mom used to call me that regarding my romantic interests, which varied from day to day).
However, my open-mindedness shuts every available in-leaking orifice whenever conservative-radio listeners begin to rant, so I smiled again and said, “I’m Libertarian,” and buckled my seat belt.
He didn’t waste any time in bellowing back, “Well, then you’re an idiot.”
I could do nothing but laugh and laugh, start the car, and drive away.
Back at home after a few other stops, I prepped supper, then gathered tools to work on my shed roof. The shingles have a leaky area which I’ve tried unsuccessfully to fix before, so I’d gleaned some plastic foundation sealer sheeting or something like that from my parents’ construction site to cover the suspect area. But the roof was still ice covered, so I gave up and decided instead to use the new chain saw chain I’d just bought for cutting up some branches I’ve accumulated.
If you haven’t tried accumulating branches, you really should give it a go.
Trouble was, after about five minutes of really swell cutting, I hit a nail or something with the saw and from then on it cut like fine-tooth sandpaper, so I ended my outdoor work stint with filling some new driveway potholes with gravel.
Somewhere in there I dropped over to my sister’s house to borrow some cream cheese. Earlier in the afternoon I’d gotten the recipe for the cake I’d made from her blog, but was opting to make a non-peanut butter version of her recommended icing.
“I have two packages,” she said.
“I just need one.”
“Okay. And you don’t have to return it, either, since we’re leaving the country.”
“In that case, can I have both?”
“Yes, but let me check this recipe right now…I might actually need it. Ah-ha. Yes, I need it. Sorry, you can have only one package.”
“What are you making?” I asked.
“Just some peanut butter icing.”
Yup, the same icing I’d decided not to make.
And then, glory be, it was suppertime: perfectly steamed carrots, perfectly cooked and straight-from-the-rice-cooker jasmine rice, crock pot chunks of pork wallowing in high-fructose corn syrup barbecue sauce, and banana cake with cream cheese icing and cold milk.
We were ready for the meal, too. The girls shoveled it down, and so did I. M took dainty bites.
By bedtime we’d eaten all but one tiny piece of the pound and a half of meat, more than two-thirds of the rice (I’d put four cups of dry grains into the cooker), all five of the steamed carrots, and over a quarter of the 9×13 banana cake.
“It’s my consolation meal,” I told everyone, “since I have to go back to school tomorrow.”
The powerful film Les Miserables is not only wrenching in its portrayal of human squalor and immensely hopeful; it also is an expansive summary of the meaning of Christianity.
The premise of the story is simple: a man shown grace lives a life of showing grace, while another man shown grace rejects it and in its face self destructs. That grace shown cuts each man to his core and causes an agony answerable only by reinvention. The inspiring protagonist works out his redeeming salvation by exercising that grace; the other man refuses to accept or show grace, sticks to rightful insistence, and can face living no more.
Love versus law, giving dignity to the ashamed versus meting out just desserts, persistent hope versus historical grievance: the cinematic dichotomies are the material of a New Testament treatise, without the baggage of conditional theology. Les Miserables is but a story about people accepting (or not) the only possible enduring response to our human fallibility: grace.
To accept that grace is to receive welcome permission to live graciously; to reject that grace advances one’s own meaningless destruction.
