by John Hodgman
There was no good answer as to why Flurry deserved to live. I mean, it’s true that Flurry knew the term “cognitive dissonance.” That’s pretty impressive. But what it really came down to was that the dead creature in my hand was literally a country mouse, and Flurry was a city mouse. Tribalism is poisonous but powerful: I sided with the coastal elite.
Oh, but also, I would say to those sad and lifeless eyes, Flurry never pooped one hundred times in my silverware drawer last night. So good-bye and good riddance, my eternal enemy! And then I would throw the mouse body away and let it decay there, in the garbage bag, for months and months, unmourned.
Of course, we punished the mice to punish ourselves. We had lived with that mouse poop for a long time. For years we would come back to the house and open the drawer and once again see those little ice-cream sprinkles of mouse droppings in there, and say, “Oh well.” We took out the silverware and washed the drawer. Eventually we surrendered to the mice, leaving the drawer empty for them and keeping all the forks and knives and spoons in upright glasses on the counter. When Jonathan and Christine would come to visit, we would say, “Oh, don’t open those drawers, because they are full of mouse poop.” And they thought that was a fine way to live. It amazes me that they would ever come back to our house—let’s call it what it was, our shit house—but they did, because they were as young and as dumb as we were. None of us had children yet, so the full-feces immersion therapy that is caring for infants had not yet begun. If something seemed troublesome or gross in our lives, we would close the metaphoric drawer and walk away.
What was it that flipped the switch in our maturing brains to appropriate revulsion? I don’t remember. One day I looked into the poop drawer, and the patterns the droppings made were like tea leaves, telling me a new and different story. Right, I remember thinking. It is not OK to live this way. Grown-ups do not let mice poop in the drawer. Grown-ups do not let raccoons poop on their porch. The definition of a grown-up is that they deal with shit. That’s almost all they do. They get shit done.
That’s when the traps came out.
We grew up in that house. But we didn’t grow up too much. We didn’t have to. For as I have mentioned, the region is full of young people and it has also been peculiarly attractive to rock musicians from the ’90s. Indie guitarists and lead singers homesteaded in and around Northampton, Massachusetts, for a while, a small city and former home to Calvin Coolidge. I do not know what drew them there. Perhaps it was Northampton’s very charming and passable imitation of a big city, with three-story brick buildings sheltering good coffee shops and record stores, theaters and concert venues, and a cool radio station. It has long-standing, overlapping communities of lesbians, activists, artists, writers, and glassblowers. One of my great regrets is missing the chance to meet Leonard Nimoy when he was in town for a reception at the art gallery that routinely deals in his beautiful photographs of nude people. You don’t get failed chance encounters with Nimoy and nudes in a whole lot of rural America, so maybe that’s why rock musicians picked this spot to do their own growing up and kid-having, in peace and quiet. Whatever the case, I won’t violate their privacy by naming them here. Except one.
I met Black Francis near the petting zoo at a county fair. Black Francis is the lead singer of the Pixies. I had actually met him very briefly a few years before, as his wife, Violet Clark, had asked me to sign one of my books for her oldest son, who was then one of those strange and luminous thirteen-year-olds who are my key demo.
But the Heath Fair was the first time I had spent any real time with them and their family. When they moved to western Massachusetts I ran into them at a café, and we arranged to meet at the fair: a weird, middle-aged full-family first date. That is how I found myself by the goat pen at the petting zoo, sitting down at a picnic table, making small talk with one of my cultural heroes. He was talking about going back on tour. I was trying not to talk about how important his work and his voice had been to me, how the pure jangle scream of the Pixies late in high school shocked me into a new mode of being, one where I was more tolerant of risk and adventure and less inclined to listen to the mannered jump-jive of Joe Jackson. Sorry, Joe Jackson. But I couldn’t actually say these things out loud to Black Francis, who had introduced himself as Charles. I think I admired the goats instead. They were very good at jumping on top of those little barrels.
I would not say that we clicked initially. He is very decent and slyly funny. But he was reticent. I suspect decades’ worth of conversations with dudes who are pretending not to freak out about the fact that they are talking to Black Francis will do that to you. But I could joke and gossip easily with Violet, who is also a very smart and talented musician but not someone I grew up with inside my head, and so I invited them back to dinner, and they said yes. This is the dinner I alluded to in a previous chapter. See? I was not lying!
The mouse poop stage of our lives was over at this point. There was nothing to be ashamed of in our drawers. I made vegan pizza for Violet’s vegan son and talked to him about science fiction. The younger kids did their best to socialize. My own son suggested that he break the ice by blasting the vinyl copy of Doolittle that I had given him earlier as a primer on the subject of who was coming to dinner. I intercepted him just as he was about to drop the needle.
Violet and my wife were chatting at the table that had belonged to my grandmother, and Black Francis was mostly quiet until he opened the refrigerator to find dozens of cans of Diet Moxie. His face opened in a smile. He said, “I haven’t had Moxie for years.”
Moxie, if you don’t know, is a very old regional soft drink native to New England. It was once known as Moxie Nerve Food, as its history goes back to the time when soda was patent medicine. Coca-Cola was served at the drugstore because it was a palatable delivery system for a healthy, natural stimulant called cocaine. Predating Coke, Moxie’s own medicinal cred derived from a bitter slap of gentian root, giving it a flavor profile somewhere between Dr Pepper and witch hazel. It is difficult to enjoy even ironically, and so it has largely stayed within the confines of Massachusetts and Maine, where it is sometimes mixed with coffee brandy, as the people of Maine have a punishing streak of self-hatred that makes Bostonians seem like lighthearted imps.
I was explaining all of this to Black Francis as my wife shrugged (she’s heard it all before). But I did not need to explain it to him because he is from Boston and knew most of it already. For the rest of the evening Black Francis depleted my Moxie cache can by can. The medicine did its work. We did not talk much more that night, but here was a line of connection, and for me a chance at some small repayment of an enormous debt. I have rarely been as happy.
I could pay this debt, and many other actual money debts, in part because I had just made a bunch of money. Obviously my life has always been privileged. My grandparents worked hard to foist their children up a rung on the class ladder (and also we benefitted from a nation’s lifetime of policies, de jure and de facto, to help people who looked like us along).
I took all of this for granted. I stood lazily on all of these shoulders, and got so lazy I had forgotten to make any money of my own. I wrote for magazines and websites, and I was paid mostly in small checks and journalist swag. But you cannot support even a small family in Manhattan with a designer chef’s knife, some mail-order beef jerky, a thorn-proof wax cotton jacket, or the fond memories of a junket to a Caribbean island where a man shot fine tequila into my mouth from a Super Soaker. I don’t remember how high my credit card debt got as I continued to ignore this fact. Many tens of thousands. I became adept at averting my eyes from the total in shame as I paid the minimum month after month. Credit card companies loved me.
What my grandparents had done for my parents, what my parents had done for me, I would be unable to do for my own children. Now at the end of the long list of squandered advantages was this house in Massachusetts, my mother’s house, which on many panicky 3 a.m. awakenings I wou
ld darkly fantasize about liquidating for cash.
But then I wrote a book, and then I went on television, and then I had money, real grown-up money. That sentence is as swift and dumbly easy as it all felt. And when it happened, all of those problems and all of that shame went away instantly.
This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they wouldn’t be rich. Another is that if you’re not rich, don’t worry about it, because rich people aren’t really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage. The vast degree to which my mental health improved once I had the smallest measure of economic security immediately unmasked this shameful fiction to me. Money cannot buy happiness, but it buys the conditions for happiness: time, occasional freedom from constant worry, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and the ability to be generous.
The motto of Massachusetts calls it “a quiet peace under liberty.” To be in your own space, a space that is clean and free from mouse poop, and to have enough to share, to give vegan cheese and medicinal soft drinks to the people who have made your life better: that’s the best version of being a grown-up. And I won’t be shy about bragging about that night, or for violating Black Francis’s privacy in the telling, because it made me appreciate how few get to enjoy this calm security, and what a crime that is.
I’m sorry, Charles and Violet. I enjoyed running into you both again when I performed at the Shea Theater in Montague, Massachusetts, last fall. I hope you are still enjoying rural western Massachusetts. I’m sorry we hardly ever go there anymore.
The Middle
~
Graveyard Fun
When my daughter was younger we would sometimes go to the cemetery. The cemetery is called Green-Wood. It is in Brooklyn, and its main entrance is on Twenty-Fourth Street where a giant, Gothic triple-spired gate presides. A colony of green monk parakeets, supposedly descendants of a long-ago pet store jailbreak, nest and chatter there among its cold, stony hollows. They liven up the cemetery. (Parakeets are famous ironists.)
But there is a side gate, nearer to where we live, that my daughter and I stumbled across one spring. It was just there at the end of Prospect Park West, hiding in plain sight after the last block of shops and houses and schools like a purloined letter. I was excited when we found it. I already loved our neighborhood, but to discover after years of living there that it also had a secret door to a massive Edward Gorey–esque necropolis was dreamlike, an embarrassment of weird riches. “Never forget what your father and mother have given you,” I said to my daughter. “Let’s go in.”
I only had a mustache then. It was a rainy, humid, gray spring day and I was wearing a raincoat with my hood up and dark sunglasses for some reason. My daughter was wearing her red jacket and yellow boots. We approached the guard at the gate and he stopped us.
“Are you sure you want to go into the cemetery?” he said.
“Yes!” I said.
“I was not talking to you,” he said. “I was talking to her.” And then he looked at my daughter and said, “The cemetery is very large. There are many places you can go where no one could hear you if you needed help, even if there were a lot of visitors today, which there are not, because of the rain. So I ask again: are you sure you want to go into this cemetery, alone, with this man who has a mustache and is wearing dark glasses?”
“I am not afraid,” said my daughter. “This is my father.”
Reluctantly, the guard accepted this truth, and let us pass.
The guard was right. The cemetery was mostly empty, aboveground at least. But below, it was full to bursting. They don’t bury many bodies anymore: they are almost out of room. So the ground was heaving with the dead, and nature feasted on it. We wandered over mounds of the greenest grass, and the limbs of the dogwoods, heavy with rain and fresh blooms, dipped to meet us as we navigated around the headstones and obelisks and peered through gated windows into dark tombs. It was vivid and beautiful and quiet and not scary.
In fact, I realized, we were the scariest thing there. There were a couple of actual mourners. They had the sense to drive through the cemetery rather than plod through the rain and muck. We ran into them from time to time on the road. Coming around a bend we would see their headlights and wave our hands in greeting, and each time, the car would slow and stop. I could not see into their windows, but I could imagine the inner debate as they paused.
Should we get out and save that little girl from that man?
Or should we flee from those obvious, terrifying ghosts who are creepily waving at us, luring us out of our car so that they can steal our souls forever?
After a while one impulse would win out over the other and they would drive on. It happened several times. It was fantastic.
“Let’s come back here every Sunday,” I said to my daughter. “We will stand by the side of the road and wave at passing cars. And as they turn on the road, we will run over the hill to end-run them and wave at them a second time, like that phantom hitchhiker from The Twilight Zone.
“Look at us. We have all the odd and specific details that make a good ghost story. People will say, ‘I went to the cemetery and saw them! The pale girl in the red raincoat, and the mustache man who killed her.’ They will tell the story to their friends, and soon enough people will come looking for us. They may even imagine they’ve seen us, even on those days we don’t come. And even when you’re in college and I am too sad to come here by myself, our journey through this underworld will become legend. We will continue, like descendants of descendants of the birds.”
And that way, I told my daughter, we will live forever.
Part Two
~
Maine Humor
We hardly ever go to Massachusetts anymore because we have been spending more time in Maine. My wife grew up going there. Her grandmother had visited there for many years, and after her husband died, she moved there permanently. She bought a house in 1974 on a narrow peninsula that dangles south into a bay near Mount Desert Island. The sun touches Maine first among every state in the US. But Maine likes to confuse people and generally feels conflicted on the subject of light and warmth, so its shattered coastline of necks and points and isles hides from the sun, facing any direction but east.
The house was full of antique furniture and included a wide swath of land from one shore to the other, all costing something like a hundred dollars and a sack of shells. After many years, my wife’s grandmother died. Her middle son lives in that house now year-round, a retired chemist and now full-time wood-splitter and family lore-keeper. Her youngest son is a semiretired boat- and housebuilder. He built his own house and workshop with his own hands in a nearby town. He has lived year-round in Maine all his adult life. Her oldest son, my father-in-law, became a professor of English in Atlanta. But he is retired now too and lives half the year with my wife’s stepmother in his own home by an interior, brooding private lake that suits their mood. The crags of Maine’s landscape and culture offer few easy handholds. Altogether her family has been holding fast to both for half a century. None of them would be considered Mainers. They are still “from away.”
Maine used to be part of Massachusetts, by some arrangement that made zero sense. They have never shared a border, and for most of the early life of the Union, Massachusetts ignored Maine, which was named either for a French province or a British town or for the fact that the dirt and rock portions of the state are not oceans, but the mainland. No one knows for sure. Large parts of the region north of the Penobscot River were barely mapped, and essentially ceded to British Canada. It only became a state in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise. Missouri wanted to enter the Union as a slave state, so the US government needed to find a new territory to enter as a free state, because it was believed this would make the practice of owning other humans les
s brutally and eternally criminal somehow. It didn’t. But in any case, the government was calling around to the states (and commonwealths) asking if anyone had any garbage land they didn’t want, and Massachusetts said, “Oh yes! We absolutely do. We have this whole, massive hump of half-Canada up there that we never use. Take it.” And that was how Maine was born: a new state, created in part to sustain a horrible evil, but only serving to delay its inevitable collapse by forty-three years—one further generation of legal slavery. Well, among white people. Considering the life span among slaves themselves, more like two generations.
To be fair, the humans of Maine did not seek this legacy. They just disliked Massachusetts and wanted to be alone. As they still do.
When you cross the Piscataqua River Bridge from New Hampshire’s abbreviated, novelty coastline into Maine there is a sign at the border that says “MAINE,” and beneath that, “VACATIONLAND.” It also says “VACATIONLAND” on the license plates. This is either a cruel joke, or maybe simply an error. It may be that Maine is called Vacationland because when Maine was invented, we didn’t really know what a “vacation” was yet.
After all, most humans did not take vacations until well into the twentieth century. If you lived in the country, you had a farm to tend. If you lived in the city, you had manglers to supervise or a shirtwaist factory to be burned to death in. The idea of having several days, never mind weeks or months, to relocate to a climate that was better for your lungs or gout, or to have an extra home in which to practice bridge strategies and indolence, was unimaginable to all but the most wealthy Bostonians, who were inbred and warped. Their idea of vacation was to go north, to a cold dark place, where they would not speak to their families but instead sit in silence, drinking martinis, looking out over bodies of water that you would never, EVER go into. Because the waters of Maine are made of hate and want to kill you.