You're Doing Great!

by Tom Papa

  But unlike other friends, we were both aware that this was a special friend. She was a girl. I was a boy. Which meant that we could also do something else. We weren’t exactly sure what that something was, but it was something that made us giggle and wrestle around on the lawn under the low-hanging willow tree because no one could see us there and whatever it was we were doing or trying to do, we knew enough to keep it a secret.

  That secret got out one day when her mother saw us playing around, innocently enough, but not completely without cause for concern, and that was all it took. An adult had dragged our behavior out into the open by ordering us around with that stern adult tone and we knew the fun was over and we should probably be ashamed. Eden was lost.

  From that point on I was fascinated with girls. I knew there was so much to learn and I wanted to know everything I could. I was interested in what they were talking about, what they were thinking, and why they cried. And I loved making them laugh.

  I knew that if I showed them that I cared, that I truly cared, they would open up like a book with hidden chapters and let me read it all. Boys didn’t do that. Boys didn’t share. Boys hit and were taught to stay silent. I knew what boys were made of; I was a boy and I was unimpressed.

  I didn’t chase after another girl until I was in fifth grade and fell in love with Emily. She was poised and very pretty, with long black hair. She sat next to me in class and I was infatuated. Her family had moved from the Philippines. She was restrained and didn’t want to get in trouble, so I worked extra hard at making her laugh in the middle of class. The way she would cover up her smile with her hand, and try not to look at me because she knew she’d lose control, excited me in a thousand ways.

  I had watched enough TV to know that I needed to give her a fancy gift, because that’s what men did. From what I could gather, after a man falls in love with a gal, he takes her out for food and gives her jewelry. But those men also had jobs and money and they knew where the jewelry stores were. I had none of that. But what I did have was a mother. A mom who had a very unorganized drawer that was filled with a lot of costume jewelry. That was the first jewelry shopping I ever did: sneaking into my mother’s room and looking for just the right thing for Emily.

  I knew Emily liked the finer things. She wore flat little shoes like the other girls in class, but hers had little sparkly pearls on them. I needed to pick something out that was elegant, refined, and yet youthful. And more important, something that my mother wouldn’t notice was missing.

  I picked out a beaded blue necklace that had a turquoise bird on it. It was toward the bottom of the drawer, tangled up with some other forgotten necklaces. I was pretty sure Emily would like it. I thought she probably liked blue, and everybody likes birds.

  I found a box, stuck the necklace in it, and snuck it into my book bag. I carried it all the way to school as if I were carrying the Hope Diamond. If I’d had handcuffs, I would have used them to attach myself to the bag and hired my friends as bodyguards. Only I couldn’t tell my friends. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was about to do. I had never given a girl anything before and I was already growing nervous and humiliated at the same time. This was way beyond my skill level.

  I sat with it for the entire day, waiting for a moment when we could be alone. It wasn’t until class was out that I caught up to her in the hallway. I asked if we could talk, which already made things too formal and more than a little weird. This was beginning to feel like a mistake, but it was too late to turn back.

  I quickly handed her the box.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a present.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She grimaced as she opened it. What looked like a good idea at home now in her hand looked like a weird old-lady necklace. It was something a crazy aunt would show off as a “real steal” that she picked up at a flea market dollar table.

  “What is this?”

  “That’s a bird.”

  “It doesn’t look like a bird. It looks like a rock.”

  She was right. Not only did it not look like a bird, but when she held the necklace up it was obvious that it was way too long. This wasn’t going well. She didn’t know how to react. I thought I was giving her a gift, and now it felt like I was tormenting her. Her direct honesty, which I always admired, was about to come out and slap me around.

  “It’s kind of gross,” she said as she picked some fuzz off it.

  I couldn’t respond. And then she asked me the most honest question that anyone had ever asked when I was giving them a gift.

  “Can you take it back?”

  As I returned it that night, looking at the other necklaces in the box I could have given her, I realized it had nothing to do with the jewelry I had chosen. I had picked the wrong girl. A girl who didn’t like me as much as I liked her. I had naïvely put myself out there, dangling off the edge of a cliff, fully confident that it would work out, and I had plunged to my death. I hadn’t even considered that rejection was a possibility.

  Of course, this wasn’t the last time this would happen. My life is filled with mistakes great and not so small. But I knew even then that no matter how much it hurt, I had to keep trying.

  Emily stopped laughing at my jokes. During class she turned the other way. We were through. But then I looked across the room and saw Suzanne. She was cute, with light freckles and brown hair that came down to her eyes. She looked up, caught me staring, and as she smiled back, I thought, “I bet she’d think it looked like a bird.”

  HAVE YOU EVER WORN YOUR BATHING SUIT TO A POOL PARTY AND WHEN YOU GOT THERE REALIZED IT WASN’T A POOL PARTY? I HAVE …

  FUN THINGS THAT AREN’T

  Here’s a tip for you: Don’t do what other people tell you is a good time. It never is.

  A perfect example—breakfast in bed. It’s a horrible idea. And yet every poor mother on Mother’s Day has to get a tray filled with hard toast and runny eggs, and we pin her down in her bed. “Enjoy your breakfast like a hospital patient. Good luck not spilling the juice on your nightgown. We’ll be at IHOP, see you in an hour.”

  I understand wanting to have fun, trying to find a good time, but this should be a personal decision. I really like sitting on my couch. That’s it. No book, no TV, no phone, no friends. Just sitting on my couch. This is fun for me. And I discovered it all by myself.

  Do you know what’s not fun for me? Candy apples.

  Candy apples are another horrible lie about a good time. They’re awful. First off, they’ve got it all backward. Why would you put fruit on the inside of candy? So you do all this work, get through the candy outside, and your reward is a mealy apple? What kind of incentive is that? How about if you get through the world’s most boring fruit, the apple, you’re rewarded with a candy center? At least you have something to work for.

  The world is filled with terrible “fun-filled” ideas. The ultimate is cruise ships. Please, stop with the cruise ships. It’s a dumb idea of a good vacation. Anything you can do on that dumb boat you can do here on land. Lame magic shows, waterslides, buffets, it’s all here. You don’t need to go to the middle of the ocean, where you do not belong, floating around in a giant white toilet.

  That’s all these stupid boats are. They’re giant white toilets ruining the seas. What does everybody talk about on these dumb ships? The food.

  “Oh, the food. They give you seven meals a day. They take your three meals and they add four more to it.”

  Sure, and then what does everybody do? They wander off to their room and take a dump in the sea.

  Stop it.

  I was in Italy in this tiny little town. You couldn’t fit one more person in this village. Every table was booked and every room was occupied. In the middle of dinner, a giant cruise ship pulled into port. It was the scariest thing I ever saw. The locals knew what was coming. Mothers were barricading themselves into their homes with their children, lovers were hiding in coffee shops, even the police disappeared.r />
  The gangplank came down and this army of tourists came waddling out in their Tommy Bahamas and their flip-flops as if it were an invasion. They beat the locals with selfie sticks and gobbled up all the souvenirs. They trampled through the streets, ate everything they could find, went back on the boat, and took another dump in the sea.

  Stop it.

  And what about all the diseases? Every year there’s a shocking report of yet another outbreak of a poop virus, food virus, and the latest version of E. coli on another Fun-Filled Cruise Line.

  This is caused by vacation behavior. Vacation behavior is drunk behavior. It’s “let it all hang loose” behavior. It’s “walk around all day in your bathing suit drinking mai tais” behavior.

  When we’re on vacation we become different people. That’s why people go. To get away from it all, including themselves. They leave behind the worker bee, who is filled with responsibility, obligations, and family members, and go nuts.

  I was in Hawaii last year and I saw a businessman checking in at the front desk, dressed in his tie and hard black dress shoes. He whipped out his credit card, negotiated for a better room, and tipped the bellboys. He was a man and he was all business.

  Six hours later, I saw him sitting on the top of a waterslide in his boxer shorts, a shell necklace, and a piña colada the size of his leg. He was changed. He was not a businessman. He was an animal. He wasn’t thinking about work, he was thinking about all-you-can-eat poolside nachos. He was purple with sunburn and he didn’t care. He was too drunk to care. He had nowhere to go, no boss to talk to, nothing but good times and really bad behavior.

  Now, you want to take three thousand other human beings in the same state of mind and squish them all onto a boat together where they can’t escape? Yech.

  Look, in a resort, for a little while, it can be a blast. I’m not saying you can’t have a fun time. And I’m not saying you can’t be around other people. I’m not even saying that you shouldn’t act like an idiot.

  To paraphrase Walt Whitman, “We are large. We contain multitudes.” We have all been the best person in the room and the worst person in the room. I have been a rube and I have been a poet. I have been a monster and I have been an angel. One thing I won’t be is trapped on a giant ship while drunk people throw up all around me. That’s not fun.

  Anytime someone says to me, “Come on, it’ll be fun,” I run the other way.

  Some things are fun once. When you’re young and you try something for the first time, it can actually be a lot of fun. Miniature golf, bowling, badminton, and lawn darts. Karaoke, roller-skating, and Ferris wheels. Giant lollipops, 3-D glasses, and board games. All these are fun when you’re a child because you don’t know any better. It’s a surprise.

  But as an adult you’ve done it all before and you know exactly what’s going to happen if you accept an invitation to play miniature golf. You’re going to get there; there will be some excitement as you pick out your putter, a golf ball, and a tiny pencil. You’ll play the first hole and have some laughs. And then you’ll stand there, with a miniature club in your hand, waiting for the people ahead of you to finish up, and you suddenly realize you have seventeen more holes to go!

  You’ve been trapped because you didn’t think for yourself.

  All I’m saying is have fun, but in your own way, that’s individual to you. Let the crowd run off and stand in line for bowling shoes. I’ll be having twice as much fun, by myself, sitting on my couch.

  HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO GET BACK AT YOUR DENTIST BY SHOWING UP FOR YOUR CLEANING WITH A MOUTHFUL OF CHEETOS? I HAVE …

  IT TAKES TWO

  From what I can tell, the real reason to find someone and fall in love and move in together and share calendars and a bed is so that when you’re old you’ll have someone who can help get you to your next doctor’s appointment.

  Whenever I have some sort of medical appointment of my own, I always see older couples helping each other along. And it looks like it really takes two to get there. Leaving the house when you’re old takes as much courage as jumping out of a plane when you’re younger. It’s daunting, high risk, and there’s a good chance you won’t make it back.

  I see them side by side, holding each other up like cartoon drunks, forging ahead, conquering all the treacherous obstacles in their way: parking lots, curbs, heavy doors, building directories, vaguely marked elevator keys, stairs, a loose paper cup blown across their path. It’s a minefield out there.

  Even driving is a two-person job at that point. Like soldiers driving a tank together, each has a role to play. One sits up high on a pile of books in big dark glasses, taking care of the lookout and the steering. The other, through a series of verbal commands, handles the stuff down below, working the radio and the directional and pushing on the pedals with her hands.

  This is something I’ve tried to keep in mind when I lose my patience on the road. There are a lot of cars making insane moves out there, and for years I figured they were being driven by people much like myself, only dumber, drunker, and more inconsiderate. While this could be true, a larger number are just terrible drivers because they are either very young or very old. The inexperienced drivers are encountering fresh challenges every time they head down the road. Every pothole, parked car, and squirrel represents a new, terrifying event. And the old people have seen it all, dealt with it all, and can’t remember a thing about it.

  It must be terrifying driving under the influence of extreme age. Contrary to what my kids think, I’m not old by any means, and already my skills are waning. I have the eyesight of a nearsighted mole rat. I’m not as bad as that old cartoon character Mr. Magoo, but he’s suddenly not as funny to me. For my entire life, my eyes were amazing. I would read signs from miles away, especially in front of old people just to rub it in.

  I think back on all those times my mother yelled at me to stop reading in the dark and I’d just laugh, knowing full well that I had the eyes of a bat. But maybe she was right. Maybe that’s why my eyes aren’t so great today—a mix of reading in the dark and bad karma.

  When my eyes started naturally aging and I slowly realized that I needed reading glasses, I started noticing that one eye was worse than the other. After a year or so of self-diagnosing at the CVS while picking up ChapStick and sunblock, I decided that maybe I should go to a real eye doctor.

  It was time for a real doctor’s appointment all by myself.

  My good friend referred me to her doctor on New York’s Upper East Side. This sat very well with me. The Upper East Side is filled with a lot of old, rich people who go only to the best doctors. I don’t often equate quality with money, but in the instance of health care I do. You show me a doctor who can afford the rent on Fifth Avenue and I rest easy.

  When I arrived I was met with big heavy doors with iron handles, marble floors, and a doorman. After living in New York for a long time in buildings that hardly had working doors, I found having a doorman very impressive.

  I filled out my new-patient forms and listened to the hum of the fish filter while eavesdropping on the other patients. An oboe player from the Metropolitan Opera was complaining that her appointment time would make her late for Carmen rehearsal. Only in New York.

  When they called my name I entered what looked like a library or a study that just happened to have some medical equipment in it. It was the kind of place where gentlemen of old would retire after dinner to talk about business and safari so as not to offend their wives’ dainty ears.

  The friendly nurse set me up in front of the giant eye-testing devices and I responded as best I could to which way the “E” was facing and where the hot-air balloon was on the horizon. Although I wasn’t perfect, it felt like I was kind of nailing it.

  I was led back to the doctor’s private office to wait for his arrival. When he came in he was wearing a trench coat, which you really see only in New York, D.C., and London. This is the coat of a grown-up.

  He seemed really smart. Not cutting-edge smart, but tradi
tional, “this is the way it’s always been done so we’re going to keep doing it this way because it’s the right way” kind of smart. He checked my hot-air balloon results and all seemed pretty average. And then he grew quiet. He asked me to look into his own equipment.

  “Uh-huh … hmm…”

  I started to worry.

  “I’m going to dilate your eyes. Have you ever had that done before?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Okay. It’s not a big deal. This will give me a chance to see other parts of the eye.”

  He hit me with some eyedrops, and after a couple of minutes everything grew blurry. It’s not a great feeling.

  Back on the machine.

  “Wow. Look at that. Did you have an eye injury when you were younger?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You definitely had something.… Hey, Carol,” he said, “come look at this. You don’t see this every day.”

  For a doctor who gave the impression that he’s seen everything in his career, this was not good.

  She stepped in. “Wow, will you look at that.”

  “What is it?” I asked, now sweating on the equipment.

  “You have a scar on the right cornea. It’s like a smudge right in the middle of your eye. I’m really surprised you’re able to see as well as you can.”

  “Is that why it’s fuzzy when I look out of that eye?” A stupid question.

  “That’s right. You must have scratched it pretty badly when you were a kid and now that you’re getting older it’s coming into play.”

  “I do remember this one pillow fight that I had when I got really stung in the eye,” I blurted out like a moron.