Well, what’s all this about, anyway? It’s about the power (and the price) of imagination. “Imagination is more important than information.” Einstein said that, and he should know.
It’s also a story about how people of imagination stand on one another’s shoulders. From the ground to the balloon to the man in the balloon to the man on the moon. Yes. Some of us are ground crew—holding lines, building fires, dreaming dreams, letting go, and watching the upward flight. Others of us are bound for the sky and the far edges of things. That’s in the story, too.
These things come to mind at the time of year when children graduate to the next stage of things. From high school, from college, from the nest of the parent. What shall we give them on these occasions? Imagination, a shove out and up, a blessing.
“Come over here,” we say. “To the edge,” we say. “Let us show you something,” we say. “We are afraid,” they say. “It’s very exciting,” they say. “Come to the edge,” we say. “Use your imagination.”
And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die in our beds. They to go and to die howsoever, yet inspiring those who come after them to find their own edge. And fly.
These things come to mind, too, in the middle years of my own life. I, too, intend to live a long and useful life, and die safe in my bed on the ground. But the anniversary of that little event in the village of Annonay just happens to be my birthday. And on its bicentennial I went up in a balloon, from a field near the small Skagit Valley village of La Conner. Up, up, and away.
It’s never too late to fly!
LAUNDRY
FOR A LONG TIME I was in charge of the laundry at our house. I liked my work. In an odd way it gave me a feeling of involvement with the rest of the family. It also gave me time alone in the back room, without the rest of the family, which was also nice, sometimes.
I like sorting the clothes—lights, darks, and in-betweens. I like setting the dials—hot, cold, rinse, time, and heat. These are choices I can understand and make with decisive skill. I still haven’t figured out the new stereo, but washers and dryers I can handle. The bell dings—you pull out the warm, fluffy clothes, take them to the dining-room table, sort and fold them into neat piles. I especially like it when there’s lots of static electricity and you can hang socks all over your body and they will stick there.
When I’m finished, I have a sense of accomplishment. A sense of competence. I am good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it’s a religious experience, you know. Water, earth, fire—polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles—round and round—beginning and end—Alpha and Omega, amen. I am in touch with the GREAT SOMETHING-OR-OTHER. For a moment, at least, life is tidy and has meaning. But then, again . . .
The washing machine died last week. Guess I overloaded it with towels. And the load got all lumped up on one side during the spin cycle. So it did this incredible herky-jerky lurching dance across the floor and blew itself up. I thought it was coming for me. One minute it was a living thing in the throes of a seizure, and the next minute a cold white box full of partially digested towels with froth around its mouth, because I guess I must have fed it too much soap, too. Five minutes later the dryer expired. Like a couple of elderly folks in a nursing home who follow one another quickly in death, so closely are they entwined.
It was Saturday afternoon, and all the towels in the house were wet, and all my shorts and socks were wet, and now what? Knowing full well that if you want one of those repair guys you have to stay home for thirty-six hours straight and have your banker standing by with a certified check or else they won’t set foot on your property, and I haven’t got time for that. So it’s the laundromat over at the mall.
Now I haven’t spent a Saturday night in the laundromat since I was in college. What you miss by not going to laundromats anymore are things like seeing other people’s clothes and overhearing conversations you’d never hear anywhere else. I watched an old lady sort out a lot of sexy black underwear and wondered if it was hers or not. And heard a college kid explain to a friend how to get puke off a suede jacket.
Sitting there waiting, I contemplated the detergent box. I use Cheer. I like the idea of a happy wash. Sitting there late at night, leaning against the dryer for warmth, eating a little cheese and crackers and drinking a little white wine out of the thermos (I came prepared), I got to brooding about the meaning of life and started reading the stuff on the Cheer box. Amazing. It contains ingredients to lift dirt from clothes (anionic surfactants) and soften water (complex sodium phosphates). Also, agents to protect washer parts (sodium silicate) and improve processing (sodium sulfate), small quantities of stuff to reduce wrinkling and prevent fabric yellowing, plus whiteners, colorant, and perfume. No kidding. All this for less than a nickel an ounce. It’s biodegradable and works best in cold water—ecologically sound. A miracle in a box.
Sitting there watching the laundry go around in the dryer, I thought about the round world and hygiene. We’ve made a lot of progress, you know. We used to think that disease was an act of God. Then we figured out it was a product of human ignorance, so we’ve been cleaning up our act—literally—ever since. We’ve been getting the excrement off our hands and clothes and bodies and food and houses.
If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds. One cup of fixit frizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good.
Don’t try Cheer, by the way. I tasted it. It’s awful. (But my tongue is clean now.)
In reconsidering the Kindergarten book I was tempted to leave this story out. I don’t do the laundry very much anymore. But sometimes I do—and for the same rea-son other people weed a garden or clean out a kitchen drawer. Doing a straightforward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity.
And yes, I still stick things to my body with electricity. Poly-pro really works well. I once got everything in the dryer to cling to me long enough for me to walk through the kitchen and demonstrate my skill. It made my grandchildren laugh, which was the idea.
As to soap, I admit I’ve tried Bold, Power, Tide, True Grit, and Arm & Hammer—just because I like the notion of having muscle in my washing powder, and because I am a sucker for colorful packaging. Any old product that says “NEW AND IMPROVED” on it calls out to me.
I, too, hope to be New and Improved someday.
MEDICINE CABINETS
I WAS JUST WONDERING. Did you ever go to somebody’s house for dinner or a party or something and then use the family bathroom? And while you were in there, did you ever take a look in the medicine cabinet? Just to kind of compare notes, you know? Didn’t you ever—just look around—a little?
I have a friend who does it all the time. He claims he is doing research for a Ph.D. in sociology. He says lots of other people snoop in medicine cabinets, too. And they aren’t working on a Ph.D. in sociology. It’s not something people talk about much—because you think you might be the only one who is doing it, and you don’t want people to think you’re strange, right?
My friend says if you want to know the truth about people, the bathroom is the place to go. All you have to do is look in the drawers and shelves and cabinets. And take a look at the robes and pajamas and nightgowns hanging on the hook behind the door. You’ll get the picture. He says all their habits and hopes and dreams and sorrows, illnesses and hang-ups, and even their sex life—all stand revealed in that one small room.
He says most people are secret slobs. He says the deepest mysteries of the race are tucked into the nooks and crannies of the bathroom, where we go to be alone, to confront ourselves in the mirror, to comb and curry and scrape and preen our hides, to coax our aging and ailing bodies into one more day, to clean ourselves and relieve our
selves, to paint and deodorize our surfaces, to meditate and consult our oracle and attempt to improve our lot.
He says it’s all there. In cans and bottles and tubes and boxes and vials. Potions and oils and unguents and sprays and tools and lotions and perfumes and appliances and soaps and pastes and pills and creams and pads and powders and medicines and devices beyond description—some electric and some not. The wonders of the ages.
He says he finds most bathrooms are about the same, and it gives him a sense of the wondrous unity of the human race.
I don’t intend to start an epidemic of spelunking in people’s bathrooms. But I did just go in and take a look in my own. I get the picture. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There I am.
Go take a look. In your own Temple of Reality.
And from now on, please go to the bathroom at home before you visit me.
My bathroom is closed to the public.
JUMPER CABLES AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN
“HEY, YOU GOT JUMPER CABLES, buddy?” “Yeah, sure. I got jumper cables.”
English teacher and his nice sweet wife, from Nampa, Idaho (as I found out later). In their funny little foreign car. Drove around Seattle with their lights on in the morning fog, and left the lights on when they went for coffee, and so forth and so on. Dead meat now. Need jumper cables. Need Good Samaritan. Need a friendly hand from someone who looks like he knows what to do with jumper cables. And the Good Fairy of Fate placed them in my hands.
Men are supposed to know about jumper cables. It’s supposed to be in the genetic code, right? But some of us men are mental mutants, and if it’s under the hood of a car, well it’s voodoo, Jack, and that’s the end of it.
Besides, this guy only asked me if I had jumper cables. He didn’t ask me if I knew how to use them. I thought by the way he asked that he knew what he was doing. After all, he had an Idaho license plate and was wearing a baseball cap and cowboy boots. All those people know about jumper cables when they’re born, don’t they? Guess he thought a white-bearded old man wearing hiking boots and driving a twenty-year-old VW van was bound to use jumper cables often and with authority.
So I get out my cables, and we swaggered around being all macho and cool and talking automobile talk. We look under the hood of his rig, and there’s no battery.
“Hell,” I said, “there’s your problem right there. Somebody stole your battery.”
“Dang,” he said.
“The battery is under the backseat, dear,” said his nice sweet wife.
“Oh.”
So we took all the luggage and travel-junk out of the backseat and hauled the seat out into the parking lot and, sure enough, there it was. A battery. Right there. Just asking for jumper cables to be laid on it. I began to get worried when the guy smirked at his wife and said under his breath that he took auto mechanics and sex education at the same time in high school and they had been confused in his mind ever since, when it came to where things were and what you did to get any action out of them. We laughed. His wife didn’t laugh at all. She just pulled out a manual and started thumbing through it.
Anyway, the sum of our knowledge was that positive poles and negative poles were involved, and either one or both cars ought to be running, and six-volt and twelve-volt batteries and other-volt batteries did or did not work out. I thought he knew what he was doing, and kind of went along with it. Guess he did the same. And we hooked it all up real tight and turned the ignition key in both cars at the same time. And there was this electrical arc between the cars that not only fried his ignition system, it welded the jumper cables to my battery and knocked the baseball cap off his head. The sound was like that of the world’s largest fly hitting one of those electric killer screens. ZISH. Accompanied by an awesome blue flash and some smoke. Power is an amazing thing.
We just sat down right there in the backseat of his car, which was still sitting out in the parking lot. Awed by what we had accomplished. And his wife went off with the manual to find some semi-intelligent help. We talked as coolly and wisely as we could in the face of circumstances. He said, “Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.” English teachers talk like that.
“Sure are,” I said. “Like matches in the hands of a three-year-old. Or automobiles in the hands of a sixteen-year-old. Or faith in God in the mind of a saint or a maniac. Or a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a movie character. Or even jumper cables and batteries in the hands of fools.” (We were trying to get something cosmic and serious out of our own invocation of power, you see. Humbled as we were.)
Some time later I got a present in the mail from Nampa, Idaho. From the guy’s nice sweet wife. As a gesture of grace—forgiveness combined with instruction and admonition to go and sin no more. What she sent was a set of electronic, true-start, foolproof, tangle-free jumper cables. Complete with instructions that tell you everything and more than you ever wanted to know about jumper cables in English and Spanish. The set is designed so that when you get everything all hooked up, a little solid-state switch control box tells you if you’ve done it right or not, before any juice flows. Gives you time to think if you really want to go ahead.
We could all use a device like that between us and power, I guess. It’s nice to know that progress in such things is possible—in the face of ignorance and pride. Progress is possible. Next time he’ll ask his wife first. Good Samaritans may be handy and enthusiastic, but if they are dumb, they aren’t much help.
BAD SAMARITAN
ARE YOU INTERESTED in humility avoidance and escaping a dumb death?
I can help.
Every time I do the same dimwit thing again, I mutter, “I’ll never learn.” As if acknowledging ignorance takes care of the problem. Yet, sometimes I get it straight—learn something by heart so firmly I’ll take the knowledge with me to my grave. My most recent triumph:
If you woke me up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night and shouted, “Battery Cables!” I’d sit up in bed and rap out my mantra:
“Separate and off. Red to good red. Red to bad red.
Black to good black. Black to engine block.
Start good car. Start bad car. Wait and reverse.”
Be impressed. I’ve got this thing down. Nailed. Internalized. Never again will you find me standing by at a dead battery scene red-faced and ashamed of both my stupidity and what I’m about to go ahead and do anyhow.
The motivation? Humiliation. Again and again AND AGAIN, humiliation. Frying an ignition system or two. Getting zapped flat by jumping juice. Being laughed at by my grandchildren when I tried to help a stranded motorist. Finally, when I didn’t stop to help a lady holding a scrawled sign saying “Dead battery—need help,” and my wife gave me her what’s-wrong-with-you lecture. Enough. It was time to stop being the Bad Samaritan.
I consulted several experts: a clerk at an auto parts emporium, a woman at a battery store, a driver for a AAA rescue truck, my friend Fred at my local gas station, and a seventeen year old kid who builds hotrods. They all gave me the same instructions. So, this is high-end information. Attend carefully—I will elaborate:
First, always use battery cables. Speaker wire or metal clothesline won’t do.
Second, make sure the two cars are close, but not touching, with power off.
Third, attach red clamp to the good car battery on side of battery with 1.
Fourth, attach red clamp to 1 side of bad battery.
Fifth, attach black clamp to 2 side of good battery.
Sixth, attach black clamp to engine block of car with dead battery.
(Why not to the minus side of the bad battery, you ask? If there is a spark when attaching the last cable, and the old battery is emitting fumes, you might cause an explosion and damage parts of you. Grounding the cable away from the battery avoids this possibility.)
When everything is connected, pray. Start the engine of the car with the good battery, wait a little, then start the car with the dead battery. Wait a little again to give the de
ad battery some life.
At this point, you may want to jump up and down, shout for joy, and thank Almighty God that it worked and nobody is dead or humiliated, most of all you. Then reverse the order in which you made the connections: black block off, black minus off, red bad off. Red good off.
If this doesn’t work, call your mom. She probably knows more about what to do next than your dad does. He’ll just give you a lot of voodoo moves that used to work on his old truck back when he was in high school. She’ll tell you to call AAA or a tow truck.
Using modern memory techniques, I have reduced my mantra to even simpler information: “Aretha Franklin, the American Red Cross, and Death.”
I can reconstruct the battery procedure from these three concepts. Consider: Aretha is famous for a tune called R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and that’s the required mental attitude for this job—respect—electricity is dangerous. The American Red Cross, of course, is the place to begin—with the red cable at the positive plus sign. And death is what will happen if I don’t remember to put the last black cable on a grounded place.
With my luck, though, I’ll still panic. I can see me now, standing there in the rain on some dark and stormy night, trying to explain to some poor soul about how the battery cable deal depends on remembering “Lena Horne, the Salvation Army, and Severe Illness.” “What?”
The Bad Samaritan strikes again.
BAR STORY
REAL EDUCATION comes in unexpected places. Real teachers know that.
When I began graduate school I needed a job—a night job—one that paid good money for short hours. Not easy to find. In desperation I accepted employment as a bartender in a hotel. Sounds OK, doesn’t it? Any problem with being a bartender? Well, actually, yes. Or so I thought at the time.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Page 4