At least I didn't wet my pants

Surely you remember that day in your middle school science class when you had to blow bubbles through a straw into a solution of bromothymol blue to watch how the slightly acidic carbon dioxide from your breath causes it to turn yellow.  I have to believe this is true, because otherwise, how could I justify forcing this activity on the students in my science classes?  

Several years ago, I was attempting to teach my middle school students basic chemistry by doing this very activity.  I had arrived at school early to unpack beakers, mix chemicals and set out straws and safety goggles.  The students were to first blow bubbles into a windshield washer fluid- blue solution and use a timer to find out how long it took to turn yellow.  Then they were instructed to do jumping jacks for thirty seconds and repeat the process with a new beaker of bromothymol blue solution. Scientifically, the exercise would cause them to exhale more carbon dioxide, liquid would turn yellow much more quickly the second time.

As the students filed into class, I partnered them up and passed out crooked photocopies of instructions.  They sat down at black lab tables, where the more mature students focused on either trying to start or end romantic relationships through a series of hand gestures and facial expressions, while the less mature students focused on drilling holes in the tables with paperclips or shoving gum into the holes drilled by immature students in previous classes.  With this in mind, it is no wonder that my rapid fire, didactic instructions for the lab activity sailed over their heads and right out the window.  

When I told them to begin, I saw one student suck a mouthful of liquid up into her mouth, while another student immediately attempted to do jumping jacks as his partner blew bubbles into the beaker.  Although I tried to steer them back on course, I saw other students continuing to wink or drill, and it became clear to me that I needed to orchestrate some kind of dramatic moment, like teachers in movies always do in order to ameliorate the situation.  

So, like the movie-star teachers do, I slammed the door loudly and shouted ‘Everybody STOP!’  Truly, this was an unusual move for me, but dramatic times call for dramatic measures.  Inside, my mind was wandering to what I had packed for lunch, whether I would go to the gym after school and how many miles over my oil change I had driven.  On the outside though, I was all business.  My initial tactic of talking fast and loud at the students had failed, so I was forced to try a new tactic.

I scanned the room and quickly called Bill to the front of the room.  He was a  student who was bright, although easily distracted by every girl, insect, plant, poster or window in the room.  I explained that he and I would demonstrate the activity and when we were sure that everyone else understood how to do it, the rest of the class could proceed.  This was a student who had recently beat me at a classroom ‘trashball’ contest, so to be completely honest, I was happy to set up another friendly competition so that I handily beat him and reset order in our world.  I turned to another student named Julia and handed her a timer, instructing her when to hit start and stop.  After donning our safety goggles Bill and I both blew bubbles into our beakers until they turned from blue to yellow.  

Up to this point, I have described a pretty typical day in what I believe is a pretty typical middle school science classroom.  It is what happened next that made this day what into what has become one of the most seminal days in my teaching career.  In order for what follows to make sense, it is important to consider these two facts about me:  one is that I have always been competitive to a fault and two is that I had only recently returned from maternity leave.  The importance of these details will soon become evident.

After we had blown bubbles into the first beakers, I instructed Julia to set the timer for thirty seconds, and I looked at Bill and challenged him to a jumping-jack contest.  The students on my side of the room were to count how many jumping jacks I did and the students on Bill’s side of the room were to count how many he did.  Julia shouted ‘Go’ and we furiously started jumping.  

I would describe myself as a generally fit person.  I exercise frequently and had recently completed a 46 mile hike over 20 peaks in New Hampshire’s white mountains.  Based on this, I had expected that 30 seconds of jumping jacks would barely tax me at all and that I could continue teaching as if nothing had happened.  However, the factor that I had not considered is the considerable loss of bladder control that resulted from squeezing a cantaloupe-sized baby-head out through a kiwi-sized tunnel during childbirth.   

For the first ten seconds, we were neck and neck.  Then suddenly, I felt a little drop of pee squeeze out.  Certainly this is gross to consider, but from time to time it happens, no big deal.  But this time, the drop grew to a trickle.  And then the trickle grew to a full stream.  The seconds seemed to slow to minutes as the full horror of what was happening became clear:  in front of a whole class of students, while engaged in a ridiculous contest of athletic prowess, I was full-on wetting my pants.  All of the reading I had done, papers I had written and hours I spent observing other science classrooms in preparation to become a teacher had not prepared me for this moment.  

You might have guessed that I would run from the room crying, or at least quit the competition and concede the win to Bill in order to excuse myself and get cleaned up.  But for some reason, when I had gotten dressed that morning, I had put on a v-neck sweater, a conservative, but short denim skirt, white tights and knee high, brown leather boots.  And so as the pee kept flowing, I felt it trickle down my leg and begin to fill my left boot.  My eyes widened as I realized that I was literally peeing my pants and that no one had any idea.  

The last ten seconds passed and the contest was over.  My boot was full to just below the ankle with pee and I was sweating, not from the exercise, but the embarrassment and  exhilaration of realizing what had just happened.  

I blew bubbles into the second beaker, and instructed Bill to do the same.  As expected, both beakers turned yellow almost immediately.   For insurance, as I set my beaker back down on the cart, I ‘accidentally’ spilled a little onto the floor, just in case.  The students started working, and I was grateful to see that they had a much better understanding of the process, thanks to the clear demonstration we had provided them.  I sloshed from group to group, helping them fill out data tables and reset their timers.  At the end of class, the bell rang, the students went to lunch, and I went to the bathroom where I removed my boot and poured a trickle of yellow-brown urine into the toilet.  

I leaned back against the stall wall and closed my eyes.  In that moment, I was convinced that what had just happened would go down as one of my worst teaching moments.  However in the years that have passed since then, I have come to view it as one of the most formative.  After you have peed your pants in front of a whole class of students and carried on as if nothing happened, it makes many other potentially traumatizing situations seem trivial.  Student calls me a bitch?  At least I didn’t wet my pants.  A small to medium-sized fire breaks out in my classroom?  At least I didn’t wet my pants.  A parent heckles me, a coworker harasses me, a fight breaks out?  At least I didn’t wet my pants.

The Greatest Gift

It didn’t take long to dig through the topsoil and into a layer of gravel followed by a layer of sand.  My father-in-law had the shovel and I held an open red plastic cooler in one hand, like the kind you would fill with ice and a six-pack if you were spending the day out on a boat.  It was hot for June, and the sun shone brightly.  The air was still and quiet, so when flies began to show up and buzz around us, they seemed louder than usual.

As I watched the hole get bigger, I tried to trace the convoluted path through space and time that led me to this particular moment that I found myself sharing with a 65 year old man who had been a stranger to me just a few years prior.  It might have begun when I was a young girl growing up on a farm, where the cycle of life was constantly present in the birth, feeding, milking, and slaughter of dairy cows.  Or it could have been when I met my husband, who to this day tends to nurture and even delight in my more curious decisions instead of gently coaching me away from them.  And vaguely in the background is moving to the Live Free or Die State, where we get to make our own decisions about helmets, seatbelts and kindergarten.  While each of these events may have contributed in their own minor way, there are a few key events that clearly led me to this day.

Several months prior, I had given birth to a baby girl.  There’s really no way to explain the experience, so I’m not even going to try.  Suffice it to say, by the end, I was physically, mentally and emotionally taxed.  Still though, when the doctor offered to show me the placenta, which came out after the baby, I couldn’t resist.  And when she placed a pink plastic tub in front of me, I have to say I was amazed at the large mass inside that glistened blue and black and purple.  To be honest, I swelled with a little bit of pride in the fact that all of the cheese and full-fat yogurt and egg sandwiches I had binged on during my pregnancy had actually turned out a squiggly little baby AND this juicy porterhouse steak sized lump.  So it stung a little when the doctor told me that it would be ‘medically disposed of’ and before I could stop myself, I asked if I could keep it.  After all, I made it, I weakly explained.  

The nurses exchanged a glance.  ‘Oh, she’s one of those,’ they said with their raised eyebrows.  Frankly, I would have thought they had already figured that out.  Between the doula that we had hired and her collections of tinctures and salves and my five page birth plan which we mostly ignored, I thought it would have been no surprise that I asked to keep the placenta, even though it was truly a spontaneous request.  Still though, they complied and soon I was wheeled out of the room, nine pound baby girl on one side and a white plastic tub labelled ‘WHALEN--PLACENTA’ on the other side.  

In hindsight, I hadn’t actually wanted to possess the placenta for any reason.  I think I had felt vulnerable and like I didn’t have control of any part of the whole birth situation.  The baby was in charge, the doctor was in charge, but I was never in charge.  So when I saw the opportunity to make one small decision for myself, I leapt at the chance.  But truthfully, had I been shown the placenta just a few minutes later, after I had begun to gather my wits, I likely would have let it pass.  Instead though, as if becoming a parent wasn’t enough, I had also taken on the burden of managing this lifeless purple organ.  

When we were getting ready to leave the hospital, more than one nurse circled by our room to say ‘Don’t forget to grab your placenta from the fridge before you go!’  When they said the word placenta, they lowered their voices to pretend whispers that actually accentuated the word more than if they had just said it normally.  Thanks to these nurses, there was no opportunity to casually leave it behind like how leftovers get forgotten and shoved to the back of the fridge until someone finally gets fed up and throws everything in the trash.

Naively, I had pictured us leaving the hospital with big smiles on a sunny day, me in a breezy print dress, the baby nuzzled in my husband’s arms as we confidently strode off into the sunset.  Instead, they make you strap the baby into the carseat before you walk out the door so they know you do it right.  And they made me roll out in a wheelchair, carrying the white plastic tub on my lap.  

In the excitement and bustle of arriving home with our new, pink baby girl, the placenta was relegated to the freezer, next to pans of lasagna and half eaten tubs of ice cream.  Several weeks later, after the dust of adding a new family member had settled, I realized I needed to figure out what to do with it.  Unless you have been in this situation, you probably have never considered how complicated it really is.  Oddly, I struggled to decide whether the placenta was something I should dispose of immediately and never speak of again, or if it was something I should cherish and try to do something special with.

I will review each option separately.  The easiest option would be to get rid of it.  However, this is more difficult that you might think.  I didn’t really like the idea of just schlupping it into our trash cans and then waiting for a month or more until we made it to the dump.  Nor did I care for the idea of composting it, only to look out the window and see my dog carrying the fruit of my womb in his mouth like common roadkill.  The third and somewhat sketchy option didn’t appeal to me either:  rolling the placenta up in a plastic shopping bag and sneaking it into the trash outside a  Dunkin’ Donuts.  While I could probably pull it off, I feared ending up an overblown news item on weather.com, especially since I hadn’t lost the baby weight yet.

Since none of these ideas really rang true to me, I thought that maybe there was some primal instinct driving me to find purpose or use for the fading organ.  As a kid, I watched typically herbivorous holstein cows deliver slimy black and white babies only to turn around and chow down on their placentas as casually as they would eat fresh grass from my hand.  And in college, I remember learning about the valuable nutrients trapped in the placenta that new mothers can only recapture through placentophagy.  And although the economy of recycling these hard earned proteins appealed to me, there were three reasons why I did not pursue this option.  The first was that in our modern age, adequate nutrition is no more than a trip to the grocery store away.  The second was that I haven’t eaten meat in many years, although perhaps if the dairy cows made a special exception, I could to, if it weren’t for reason number three:  Freezer Burn.  In the hospital, the placenta had looked kind of special and beautiful, but I have to say that it had not aged gracefully and was now a sickly grey color underneath a thick layer of frost.  So eating the placenta, while a fine choice for others, was not going to happen.  

With throwing it in the trash out, and eating it out, I was kind of at a loss.  So I did what any other reasonable adult would do when they felt conflicted about what to do with their frozen placenta:  turned to google.  After twenty five different search permutations, all related to ‘placenta traditions,’ I actually hit on an idea that appealed to me.  I learned that in some areas of the world, there is a tradition of burying the placenta in the ground and then returning a year later to plant a fruit tree in the baby’s honor in that same spot.  This idea is really a win for everyone:  the mom doesn’t have to eat the placenta, the kid gets a cool tree, the tree gets great fertilizer and everyone gets fruit!  

By the time I learned of this tradition, the ground had thawed, the birds were singing and the time for digging holes was right.  Unfortunately though, our yard has pretty terrible soil, and the light is bad and it’s on a big hill.  If I was going to follow through with this placenta tree project, I thought I should at least do it somewhere that the tree could have a shot at a healthy, productive life.  However, my father-in-law, who lives not too far away, has a small orchard which is bordered by a christmas tree farm.  Another thing about my father-in-law is that he is a competitive gift-giver, always trying to think of the most creative, thoughtful and over the top gifts.

In the past, I had given him tote bags that I made out of chicken feed sacks, rare seeds from around the world and even a framed collection of detailed animal silhouettes that I had snipped out of white paper.  While these gifts were easily outdone, I knew that the plastic tub in my freezer held something that could never be topped.  A bonus was that it would really be a two part gift, since I would have to return a year later to plant a fruit tree that would hopefully thrive in the soil made rich by the nutrients I had worked hard to collect during my pizza and chocolate fueled gestation.  So with Father’s day right around the corner, I printed up a little blurb about the placenta tree tradition, sealed it into a card and got ready for the big day.  

I will admit that as I am writing this, it seems a little odd. But at the time, it seemed as ordinary as wrapping up a tie or ordering a book from Amazon.  The weekend of Father’s day, my husband was at work, so I took my daughter and we went to deliver the big gift.  I’m not sure how you would react to someone pulling up in your yard a half-thawed placenta in a cooler that she was  fully intending to bury it in your yard, but my father-in-law was nothing but gracious, if not a little surprised.  

So once the baby fell asleep, we headed out to a special spot in between a lilac and an heirloom apple tree and started digging.  When other cultures do this, there is probably some sort of ritual--maybe a song or a dance or at least a maraca that they shake or something.  But frankly, I couldn’t really think of anything to say.  So we stood wordlessly side by side and when the hole was big enough, I tipped the cooler up until the gelatinous, bloody mass fell in.  We exchanged a solemn glance, which I interpreted as ‘we must never speak of this again.’  Our eyes turned back to the hole and watched as he shoveled the layers of sand and soil and sod back into it.  Although the moment may have been slightly awkward, it was awkward in a kind of sweet and special way.   As far as harebrained ideas go, I would have to say it ended in the ‘weird but nice’ category.  And it was certainly better than getting arrested for illegally dumping medical waste at a rest stop.  

Planting the pear tree over the placenta.

You can check out pictures of what a placenta looks like here:

http://sciencefriday.com/blogs/02/26/2015/picture-of-the-week-human-placenta.html?series=3

Literacy in America

I was recently at a coffee shop getting a cup of coffee with a coworker when he excused himself to use the restroom.  A moment later, my phone buzzed and I found that he had texted me a picture from the bathroom.  It was a picture of a small sign with instructions directing the user to pull the handle in an upwards direction to eliminate liquid waste and to push the handle downward in order to eliminate solid waste.  

Initially, I saw this sign as yet another pathetic attempt at greenwashing like a sign asking you to take only one napkin at a Philly Cheesesteak stand on a street corner, but as I reread the complicated instructions, I realized that there, in the coffee shop bathroom was the key to saving our country.

I regularly hear or, ironically, read about how America is in trouble because of all the middle schoolers in Finland and Japan doing fancy math and using sophisticated words just to show off.  And it makes me wonder what is wrong with the youth of today that they don’t just learn to read and write because they are told to like every other kid in the G.D. world.  Well, every other kid that has the luxury of vaccines, water and food, that is.  And sitting there in the coffee shop, I realized that the problem is that we haven’t properly incentivized these skills.  All kids hear about in school is ‘your future blah blah blah’ and ‘livable wage health insurance student loan blah blah blah.’  As adults, these are the things that are important to us and so we love to talk about them.

But the problem is that kids don’t care about these things.  So what we need to do is make the benefits and rewards of reading more concrete.  Gone are the days of reading for reading’s sake because now when you want to be entertained, there are far better ways than sitting down with a heavy book whose pages you literally have to turn only to nod off, lose your place and then have to restart the whole book next day.  We live in an age where anything worth consuming can be done on the internet and with rare exception, takes less than four minutes.  Which is why reading is pleasure is dead and we now need to move on and refocus on reading as function.  

In order to do this, we need the architects, engineers and manufacturers of all of our stuff to get on board.  They already have one foot on this train, and what I mean is this:  when you look in your refrigerator, you will see all kinds of instructions for how to open different kinds of bottles and jars.  Most likely the text reads ‘Twist to Open’, but you probably don’t know this because you probably already know how to open everything in your fridge without instructions.  Certainly you’ve seen other examples of this: ‘Remove Wrapper Before Consuming’ or ‘Do Not Use Underwater.’  And although these little quips make for dull but time filling conversations at work or lame parties, they do little to actually help us out as individuals or as a country because everyone knows not to eat cookies still in the package or blow dry their hair in the pool.  Still though, they are are commonplace, ignorable and most importantly, they are phase one in my plan to spread absolute, unequivocal literacy from the purple mountains majesty to the golden plains of this great country.

It’s the next part of this plan that will really make a difference.  You see, the problem with these little labels is that they are too simple.  They use plain language to explain something that everyone already knows how to do.  Instead, we need to see complicated instructions on products that have been designed to be difficult to use.  The toilet handle in the coffee shop is a start.  In order to really appreciate what the instructions are asking you to do, you need to be able to read and understand directional language (up, down), states of matter (liquid, solid) and logic (if x then y).  The problem with this sign though is that it doesn’t quite go far enough, because even if you couldn’t read, you would be able to make the toilet flush.  Imagine a similar sign on an unfamiliar flushing mechanism.  You would have the choice to carefully read and follow the instructions or face the humiliation of leaving your waste, whether liquid, solid or a little bit of both lazily floating in the bowl for the next person in line to come in and judge both your reading ability and your bodily function.  

Another example is the annoying dinging in my car that rudely reminds me to buckle my seatbelt the instant I sit in my car instead of recognizing and respecting that fact that in my state, we ‘Live Free or Die’ and buckling up is a choice not a requirement.  It took a significant amount of research, all of which included reading detailed instructions, mainly in the form of chaotic blog entries, before I learned how to disable the dinging so that I could buckle my seatbelt at my leisure instead of under imaginary pressure from a judgmental little sensor.  Again, through literacy, my use of this product was improved, however it still would have been possible for me to use my car and tolerate the dinging.

But imagine taking these two examples one step further.  Picture yourself attempting to walk out of a gas station only to come up short because the door didn’t open when you shoved your shoulder against it.  You are left with the choice of either reading the instructions or pathetically pretending to check out the display of windshield washer fluid next to the door while waiting for someone else to come along and read the sign, which has been switched from the almost condescending ‘PUSH’ to ‘When exiting, please depress lever while applying pressure and then look up and into the camera above the door and to the right with an expression of steely resolve as if to suggest today is the day you are going to make a real and meaningful change in your life.’  

By including little inspirational messages in each of these small sets of instructions, we may even see an overall morale boost in the general population.  Think of the difference you could make when you approach a crosswalk only see that the sign says ‘Cease forward progress and flash a smile of encouragement to a nearby stranger.’  You scan the passing cars only to see a man with one hand on the steering wheel while the other hand angrily squeezes and shakes an unopened package of cookies.  And as the car slows to turn a corner, you flash him a wildly enthusiastic grin which falls and turns to pity as you see the man’s unbuckled seatbelt and through his open window, you hear a slow and sad ‘ding...ding...ding.’

On bringing your husband who is from out of town to a basketball game at your old high school

If you are at home visiting your parents for Christmas and you grew up in a small town, you might be tempted to bring your husband, who is not from your town, to a basketball game at your former school.  And because he is a good sport and can only spend so much time visiting with your grandmother, he will agree to go.  He will probably drive you there and park the car, which is wonderful.  But once you get there, how can you explain the nostalgia you feel when he parks the car in the spot where you once kissed Jacob Washburn in October after play practice.  It wasn’t your first kiss, but it was your first time really making out in a gross, memorable and public way and thinking about that moment and the many years that have passed since then make you feel old and young all at the same time.

And then you will walk with him through the doors of the school into the lobby where you spent your teenage years waiting for the bus to pick you up, waiting for your parents to pick you up, waiting for your boyfriend to pick you up.  And your eyes scan the walls, knowing that your name is on that plaque and your picture is in this trophy case, but because you have lived a rich and full life in the time since high school, you don’t need to point these things out to your husband.  He only knows you as an adult and so explaining how at 18 you had imagined coming back to this school as an adult and rubbing your fingers across your name on the brass plates would seem silly.  You could still could reach up and touch the letters of your name but doing so might close a loop that you would like to keep open at least for a little while longer.  

So you pass through the lobby and into the gym and you see Doug Sharpe and he nods at you and you nod back, and your husband asks who it is and so you tell him that Doug Sharpe is the athletic director and your former health teacher.  Which is true, but he is also the teacher who publicly humiliated you in your middle school health class when you were the only one to get a perfect score on a test that asked you to label the penis, urethra, testicles, vas deferens on a large black and white diagram.  When you look at him today, you can still see the way he raised his eyebrows and announced to the class that you sure did ‘know your way around the male reproductive system’, and you remember how you weren’t sure if he was implying that you were promiscuous (which you weren’t) or nerdy(which you were).  But how can you explain the long resolved emotions of a fourteen year old to an adult man who now knows you to be only headstrong and sure to a fault?

And so you find your seats and the game begins and your team takes an early lead, which is great but then the other team shoots and makes a three point shot and your husband claps and then weakly excuses himself with ‘it was a good shot’ when he feels the stares from the crowd.  And in some cases, it is good sportsmanship to clap for the other team, acknowledging a particularly nice play or move, but the team we are playing against are the Golden Knights, the school that was your father’s biggest rival and your biggest rival and the school that you lost to in playoffs your senior year when everyone thought you had a shot at a title.  Jamie O’Neill, the girl who shoved you to the floor with both hands during a varsity basketball game was a golden knight.  Your cousin, who was so beautiful and talented that all of your friends wanted to date her was a golden knight.  And your longest standing high school crush, who never cast his light your way was also a golden knight.  So regardless the arc of the shot or the swish of the net:  you will not clap for this team.  

Then halftime comes and at half court a little girl draws a raffle ticket out of a bucket.  Your husband might comment about how cute she is and you’ll agree, but you’ll leave it at that instead of explaining that she is the daughter of your friend Christa who you first met when her pet goat was in the living nativity scene that you were part of in front of the bank one December in elementary school.  And that later you and Christa drank Boone’s Farm Apple Wine in her tent which gave you the courage to then climb over the fence of the athletic director’s house (mentioned above) and then go skinny dipping in his pool by the cover of darkness.  Or that when Christa’s sister died of cancer you kept your distance which is something you have always felt bad about and maybe that is why when you see Christa and her cute kid, all you do is smile and nod instead of hugging and catching up.  

So the winning number is drawn and everyone cheers for Cathy Westford because she gets to take home $200.  But you keep your hands in your lap because two summers ago, it was Cathy’s teenage daughter who was driving home late at night and crashed her car into your parents’ Tahoe nearly killing your mother and your brother and though she wasn’t drinking, she had beer in her car that she tried to hide before the police showed up.  You know that it’s a stretch to connect the car accident to the 50/50 raffle but when you only see these people once a decade or so, it’s easier to make these leaps.  

After halftime, the third and the fourth quarter pass quickly.  Your team wins and the players are excited and so in the moment that they have no idea that this game will fade away into the past.  It will blur into the next game and into the next season until all that is left is a smear of memories punctuated by a few clear images of kissing in the parking lot, lost friendships and moments of glory and humiliation.  Likewise for you, as you leave the gym after the game, just like you have done hundreds of times before, the memory of tonight is already drifting away.  By the time you drive away, the time warp has ended and you have moved on to thinking about what to do when the lease on your car ends, making year-end charitable donations and how each year seems to come to an end more quickly than the one before.  

The Post Office

  Shortly after graduating from college, I got into my car and drove away from the small town I grew up in for good.  The next day, my father called and told me "It's a good thing you left when you did.  The post office got stuck on the bridge this morning and you couldn't have gotten across town until the DOT came and towed it off late in the afternoon." 

I had always found my town agonizingly small and often dull.  Big news around town might be that Henry Cobbs sprained his pinky finger when a cow pinched it between a milk machine and a stanchion post or that the youngest Taylor boy got caught stealing pants off and Amish clothesline the day before Halloween.  I dreamed of living in a place where people had interesting things to talk about, where real things happened, and there was more to do on the weekend than loiter outside the gas station watching the snow fall.    

But let's get back to the post office and the bridge.  Since before I was born, our tiny one-room post office was a freestanding building propped on the north edge of the the dingy brown that lazily rolled through town, splitting it  into two halves.  When it was discovered that the foundation of the building was slowly crumbling, causing it to slowly slip towards the water, the postal service quickly moved their operations to a makeshift location in the back half of a bar on the south end of town, leaving behind a sadly empty shell with white siding and the towns zip code in bold black numbers on the front.

 For the next year or so, the old post office building sat, lonely and unoccupied, slowly and imperceptibly shifting on its ancient foundation.  There were rumors that it was to be destroyed, rumors that it was to be opened again as a bait shop, and (probably true) rumors that teenagers had claimed the building to smoke and drink and have sex in.  All of these were disproved the morning the town awoke to find the building sitting precariously in the middle of the one bridge through town.

Although I was settling into my new, far far away life, I can see the scene unfolding.  The townspeople from the north half of town gathered on one side of the bridge gazing across at the townspeople from the south half of town through the open doors of the post office.  The telephone wires must have buzzed with activity as the news spread.  "Get the dog and bring the kids!"

There was one tractor in the lead pulling a chain that had been led in through a window and out through the door.  A second tractor with a fork lift was in the back, trying to give the poor old building the boost of energy it would need to make it the few remaining yards across the bridge.  Under the tired frames of the building were several long, round logs.  The drivers of the tractors talked to each other on a cheap set of walkie-talkies. 

"Ok, now I'll push"

"Ok, I'll pull"

"Well, shit."

"Shit."

I imagine the mail lady leaving the bar/post office that morning, with a full bag of letters and bills and mail order catalogs to deliver.  Rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor the old building that used to be the post office that is now blocking the street…

I imagine the few outsiders trying to get through town that day.  Most people pass through the town without even realizing they've been there.  On this day, a wayward traveler would coast down the hill into the 30 mile per hour zone and notice a crowd of people standing in the road.  Looking further ahead, he would notice a cockeyed building and a tribe of locals either driving or shouting at the big tractors that were ineffectively trying to move it.  He would pick up his cell phone to try and make a call telling someone important he would be late, and find that he had no service.  A local would come to his aid and describe a detour, using landmarks like "just past where Old Stutterin' Joe used to live before he lost his hand," or "right where the oldest Madden boy (or was it the youngest) shot that twelve-point three years ago".

Finally, the various authorities show up.  Their first priority is to clear the bridge.  Ironically, the trucks that have the horsepower to do the job are parked in the town garage on the push side of the bridge, and they have to make the twenty-mile detour to the pull side of the bridge.  The tractor-men continue their halfhearted attempts while they wait, as the story gradually unfolds. 

Last hunting season, the Crescent brothers had a fight and decided they couldn't share their hunting camp anymore.  They decided that they each needed one of their own.  They considered splitting the cost of building one, but found it would be too expensive, and neither would want to then take the old one.  Then they somehow found out that the old post office building could be had for a song, provided it was moved off the site by a certain date.  They swooped in and bought the building, with the intention of towing it to their land, and replacing the clear acrylic tables with the pens chained to them with rustic brown, gold and orange plaid hunting furniture.  They slowly discovered, though that the building was so cheap because the red tape wrapped around moving it was thick with complicated paperwork and permits. 

The move-by date swiftly approached.  The brothers were no closer to wading through the necessary bureaucracy than the post office was to moving out of the bar.  They decided that the only solution was to take matters into their own hands.  By the cover of darkness, they would gather the friends who had the biggest tractors and simply use brute force and ignorance to muscle the building out of its foundation and away to its new home deep in the woods.  Had it worked, the plan was brilliant. 

Much to the delight of our slow-moving town, the first half of the plan went smoothly.  It was the second half, the half that involved getting the building all the way over the bridge before daylight that failed.  I believe that every one of us goes to bed each night with a small, secret hope that something exciting, something different will happen tomorrow.  The lucky citizens of my small town were indulged this warm spring morning, when they awoke to a scene that no one could have predicted.   

Within a few hours, it was over.  People shrugged their shoulders, sighed, and headed home.  The building had been moved the rest of the way across the bridge and shoved crookedly into an empty lot, right across the street from the bar/post office.  Over the next few months, the old foundation was paved over and horse tie-ups were installed to make an Amish buggy parking lot.  The Crobar brothers were issued several generic tickets, and the whole event faded into the past.  Staghorn sumac grew up around the base of the building, and the door swungopen and shut with the breeze.  Years later, the postal service is still nestled in the back of the bar, the Crescent brothers still drive beat-up pickup trucks and everyone patiently waits for the next exciting thing.    

Julie

“Hi, My name is Emily Whalen and I’d like to buy 4 tickets to tonight’s hockey game”

“Hold please,” replied a nondescript male voice.

Friends were visiting from Florida and in an attempt to show them some Yankee wintertime hospitality, I wanted to take them to sit on hard seats in an indoor arena where it would be colder inside than outside in order to watch a sport that they neither understood nor cared about.  

When I heard the voice on the other end of the line again, it sounded different:  husky and a little bit out of breath.  It was as if one of the players had been practicing out on the ice and had rushed off to answer my call when he heard the phone ring.   

“Hi Julie, this is Troy and I’ll be your customer service representative today.  Julie, I am really glad you called because I have some special offers that I want to tell you about.  I wouldn’t call them ‘secret’, but it’s fair to say that they aren’t advertised to the general public.”

I had just an instant to decide how to proceed, because, as previously stated, Julie is not my name.  I could correct him and possibly lose access to the special deals he had mentioned or just be cool and maybe get the fourteen dollar tickets for eleven or even ten dollars each.  

“OK, Troy.  Tell me about these ‘special offers.’”  Suddenly my voice was huskier too and my speech had slowed like I was auditioning for a part in Gone with the Wind or trying to do the voices in an American Girl book.    

“Julie, let me introduce you to one of my favorite products that we offer:  Flex Packs.  Do you know what a Flex Pack is, Julie?”

Before I go on, I feel that it is important to explain that I pride myself in my ability to make independent consumer decisions.  If I don’t feel like cookies, I will flat out turn down the cutest pigtailed beret-wearing girl scout.  Sometimes I even only buy one item in a buy-one-get-one-free situation.    So I was confident in my ability to resist the pitches of this hunky sounding hockey player-slash-salesman calling me by the wrong name, even if he was throwing around terms like ‘secret’ and ‘flex pack.’ The charade might be tempting and fun, but I knew that in the end, I would buy just four tickets for the game that would begin in just a few hours.   

“Julie…”

But suddenly I found myself trying on this new identity.  Maybe Emily wouldn’t buy a flex pack but who knew what kind of consumer behavior Julie might practice.  

“...Flex Packs are our most flexible and fun ticket packages.  With a Silver Level Flex Pack, you get thirteen ticket vouchers that can be redeemed for tickets to any regular season game, including Mullet Night, Pink Ice Night and Bobblehead Giveaway night!”

“Bobblehead Giveaway?” He must have sensed a weakening in my resolve.

“Yes Julie, the first 1,500 fans receive a free bobblehead of our Mascot.  And Julie, if you think the Silver Flex Pack sounds good, let me tell you about the Gold Level Flex Pack.”

Troy continued, talking all about premium seating, the popular chuck-a-puck promotion and the t-shirt cannon, saying the name Julie over and over, but I was too busy looking for my credit card which I carried loose in my backpacked, twisted among ipod headphones, rubber bands and granola bar wrappers.  I was sure that Julie would carry her card neatly in a thick but organized leather wallet, so I tried not to reveal how flustered I was after finally finding my card inside a dirty gym sock.  

“I’ll take the Gold Level Package, Troy.”  

I scraped a yogurt raisin off the first four digits of the card with my fingernail and listened as Troy congratulated me, like I had just selected a particularly expensive bottle of wine.   “Julie, you have made a great choice and it is going to be a great season,” he gushed.  “Now, Julie, if you are paying with a credit card today, I’ll just need your full name and your sixteen-digit card number.”

And that was it the end of my imaginary little narrative.  I was no longer Julie who purchased flex-packs on a whim after being sweet talked by Troy.  I was still just myself, and I still only wanted four tickets.  

“Actually, Troy, my name is Emily, and I changed my mind about the flex pack.”

“What?  I’m sorry.”

Sorry about the name or sorry about the flex pack, I wondered.  The tone of the conversation had changed and I felt a little bit hollow inside because of it.  In a pitiful attempt to simultaneously remain true to myself and to experience life as Julie, I ended up purchasing a silver level flex pack and giving away the unused tickets at the end of the season.  

In the end, I will probably never buy hockey tickets again.  Parking was terrible and the games weren’t very exciting.  But I occasionally look back with fondness on the moment that I was Julie, and I was impulsively purchasing an irresponsibly large number of tickets.  

Thanks, Troy.

Dear B.J. Novak

Dear B.J. Novak,

I am writing to you to share an idea that I had for an essay.  I was going to write it myself, but frankly, I just don’t have time.  I mean to be honest, I don’t even really have time to be writing you this letter, but this idea has just been burning like an ember in my mind and I was going to share it with David Sedaris, but to be honest, I think you need it more.  Plus, you don’t have a day job so while I spend my days going to work and the grocery store and then trying to fit in the post office or the gym, you probably sit in a little office that has one of those slanted ceilings that you have to tilt your head just to get to your desk (I am shorter than you so I wouldn’t have to duck) and peck your ideas out on some vintage typewriter (I am very busy so I touch type).  Periodically, you probably lean back in your chair, prop your feet on your desk and sigh a cliche to your cat: ‘This is the life, Boots!’ or ‘It’s just you and me, Boots!’  Since you don’t have to spend your time googling ‘how to impress your boss’ or ‘what’s a good interest rate on a retirement account’ you must really be able to flesh out an idea.  In fact you probably have four or five bad ideas for every good idea.  I wish that I had that luxury.  I don’t even have time to dig into the one really good idea that I do have (mentioned above), let alone time to waste on letting bad ideas develop in the first place.  If you can picture it, my mind is like one of those whack-a-mole games like you see at a carnival, and whenever I feel a bad idea welling up, like buying a robotic vacuum cleaner or adopting a pit bull, I just whack it down before it reaches my mouth (or my computer, if I am touch typing).  

So my idea for an essay is that you should write about when books first became popular and write about how everyone was always looking down at their books instead of looking up at the people, places and things around them.  The joke is that the whole time you will actually be talking about cell phones, not books.  So in the essay, you can write about how people kept crashing horses into each other because they were reading their books or about how birth rates dropped as books became more readily available (make sure not to mention improvements in maternal health care, increased access to birth control or vaccines).  Or you could write about people standing around the pump handle at the village well all talking about a new bestseller.  But what you really are talking about is texting and driving, people not having sex because they are too busy with their phones or how everyone at work is always talking about these viral youtube videos. (which you probably don’t know from experience, but trust me, it happens).  

If I was writing the essay, which I am not (see 1st paragraph) I might include a few small vignettes like this one:

As her father reached for another helping of potatoes, Madyson glanced down at the book in her lap.  As she did, she caught a warning glance from her mother, who had always lived on the fine line between friend and informant.  Her mother gestured with her eyebrows towards her father who had recently grown exasperated with his daughter’s constant reading.  The look said ‘Madyson, for the love of god, put that book away before your father breathes the breath of a thousand dragons at your face!’  In a perfect demonstration of typical teenage behavior, Madyson stared blankly at her mother with her mouth half open for a half a second before refocusing on the book in her lap.  Picking up on the weird vibe, her father’s gaze slowly travelled from his plate across the table to her mothers face and then rotated clockwise until it landed on the downturned head of his teenage daughter.  His breaths grew shallow as he prepared to spew tired rhetoric about ‘I don’t care if other teenagers read at the table, this is my house’ and ‘I WILL take that G.D.  book right out of your sparkly nail polished little hands and drop it down the toilet if it doesn’t disappear from the table NOW and FOREVER!!’

Now here comes the good part of this essay.  What you can do at the end of it is point out that although people used to be obsessed with books, the truth is that they barely even read them anymore.  And so while everyone is so obsessed with their phones and snapchat and Candy Crush (I only know of these from NPR references that I hear in my car on my way to work, see paragraph 1) probably in the future, they will barely even use them because there will be something better and newer and more fun.  It’s tough to imagine but maybe in the future, Verizon or AT&T will go the way of Borders, and if you take this idea, you can say that YOU SAW IT COMING.  It will be difficult to make this point without offending 1) people who love books and 2) people who love phones, but frankly, after reading your last book (to be honest, I mainly stuck to the pieces that were three pages or less) I am not sure that you care about catering to anyone’s delicate sensibilities.  

I would like to remain anonymous as I don’t have time for a detailed and lengthy correspondence with you.  If you can’t figure it out from the details above, then I guess I was wrong about you after all.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

P.S.  Why the initials?  Just use your regular name like everyone else.