Throwing Stones

I’m in a good mood as I make my way up the hill to visit a friend. The weather is transitioning to autumn; cool nights, misty mornings and bright, warm afternoons like this one. Against a brilliant blue sky, the leaves of the ancient maples lining the street rustle cheerfully in a light breeze. Fat squirrels bound across the front lawns of once grand Victorian houses, carrying last minute additions to the stockpiles that will get them through winter. I pass a nodding acquaintance from the library. We nod, giving each other smiles just wide enough to acknowledge familiarity, but not so wide we’d have to stop and chat. Even my knees are in a good mood, protesting the extra effort of the climb with mild twinges instead of the agonized yowling that usually accompanies a steep incline.

I crest the hill and round the corner onto the street where my friend lives. Yellow tape cordons off a stretch of sidewalk. On one end, the tapes are tied to the porch railings of a shabby rooming house. On the other end, they are wrapped around the bumpers of an old bus that has been converted into a police mobile command post. I hear the crackle of two-way radios as I walk around the bus and up the front walk of the restored Victorian house where my friend sits on the miniscule balcony of her second story apartment.

“What happened here?” I call up.

She tosses the answer down to me along with the key to the front door. “Murder.”

In her tiny perfect kitchen, she makes me a spectacular cup of coffee – fresh ground beans, steeped in a French press – then we sit out on the balcony for a smoke while she tells me about the murder.

There have been problems with the next-door neighbors this summer, all-night parties that regularly spilled stoned guests out onto the street where they shouted incoherently at each other. Two days previously, at the height of a particularly boisterous party, my friend heard her neighbor shout out a death threat. Shortly after that, a young man lay bleeding to death in the middle of the road, stabbed, possibly, by the woman who uttered the threat.

My friend wonders what would have happened if she had called the police. She threatened to do so earlier as the noise levels rose, but they turned down the music so she never followed through. If she had, she might have saved that young man’s life. I listen to her guilt and remember how, a long time ago, I felt the same way.

During a brief downturn in my life following the end of my first marriage, I lived in a dilapidated apartment building next door to a motorcycle gang house. It wasn’t unusual to arrive home from work and find myself unable to get to the door of the building because police swat teams were arresting my neighbors for possession of illegal firearms or busting up one of the broken-bottle rumbles that took place in the parking lot outside my living room window.

One morning, in the middle of winter, a friend who’d been visiting me went out to the bus stop and found a young woman wearing motorcycle leathers lying on the ground. Her arms were wrapped around her belly. She retched and vomited continuously. She had a split lip and a swollen bruise covered half her face. Despite the sub-zero temperature and her lack of warm clothing, she was drenched in sweat and reeked of alcohol.

I went inside, called 911 and took a blanket back out to the bus stop. We sat with her until the ambulance came while I kept a fearful eye on the front door of the gang house, worried her biker boyfriend might decide to have another go at her. She ignored us, panting and moaning in the intervals between vomiting up pale yellow bile. As the paramedics were lifting her onto the stretcher, I decided to stay with her.

In the hospital, after telling the admitting nurse everything I could, which wasn’t much, I sat alone in the waiting room listening to the young woman scream. The doctor came out and told me the she was aborting a fetus, probably killed by a blow to her stomach during the beating. She screamed because she was too intoxicated to be given pain medication.

When it was over, I went in to see her. She was still drunk enough to have problems focusing her eyes. I asked her for the name of someone I could contact, hoping to find relatives or friends. She shrieked at me to go away, to leave her alone. I returned to the hospital waiting room for a while, then realized there was nothing more to be done and went home. I felt guilty about abandoning her until I called the hospital to check on her later that day. They told me she had somehow managed to dress herself and walk out without anyone noticing.

When things like this happen now, I no longer feel guilt.  

Imagine life as a river and events as stones. Choices we make for ourselves have the most impact, like boulders tossed into the water, creating great splashing waves of consequences and redirecting the flow of life. The casual actions/inactions of others are like pebbles landing in the backwash of the waves, tiny perturbations whose ripples ultimately have little, if any, effect.

And this is how it should be. It’s okay to toss a pebble or two in someone else’s river, when the need arises, when we believe we are doing the right thing. But it’s best to reserve the big stones, the stones of commitment, responsibility and regret, for our own rivers.

Things I Never Learned in School

The other day, while I waited for the microwave to nuke a bowl of Shanghai noodles, I heard the muffled ringing of my cell phone coming from the bedroom. It rang four times before I found it in the laundry hamper. In an attempt to intercept the call before it went to voicemail, I flipped open the phone without checking caller id and found myself ear-to-voice with a telemarketer.  I wanted to hang up but couldn’t, because for a soul-harrowing four hours I was once a telemarketer myself and have no desire to encourage suicidal tendencies in others.

One November day in the late sixties, I was called to the principal’s office of my high-school and informed my attendance in class would no longer be permitted. (No, I wasn’t expelled for anything really bad like drug-dealing or beating kids up for lunch money. I was expelled for voicing negative opinions about education, frequently and in language best described as unladylike.  At the time, I was quite proud of my scurrilous vocabulary and gave others every opportunity to admire it. In retrospect, after learning to curse in four other languages and having spent a few months working as a deckhand on a package freighter, I know the cuss words available to a seventeen-year-old farm girl scarcely qualify as profanity.) Expulsion from school resulted in expulsion from home, where my opinions were equally unpopular,  and I soon discovered a big mouth is frequently an empty one. Tucking my attitude into a back pocket, I went looking for work.

I landed my first job, magazine subscription phone sales for five dollars a night plus twenty cents for every subscription sold. Back then, the only qualifications required for telemarketing were a good speaking voice and clear enunciation. (Recent conversations with telemarketers lead me to believe there are now no qualifications whatsoever.)  On my first and only night of employment, they sat me in front of a grungy black Bakelite telephone, handed me a script and some white pages ripped from a phone book. I never sold a magazine. I rarely made it all the way through the first sentence of the script. To this day, the sound of a disconnect followed by the hum of a dial tone makes me feel personally rejected. At the end of the night, I picked up my five dollars and trudged from the room, determined to starve to death before subjecting myself to that level of humiliation again and equally determined never to inflict it on another.

So, I listened politely to the young man from the cable company explain how I could save ten dollars a month for three years by switching to a new HD PVR, (high definition personal video recorder) then told him I didn’t have an HD TV. He checked with a co-worker and informed me the PVR would still work. After further questioning verified there were no hidden charges,  I agreed to order a new PVR, feeling a twinge of guilt at giving the poor kid a glimpse of success.

We chatted as I slurped up my noodles and he stumbled his way through unfamiliar computer screens, areas of the system he rarely saw. I sympathized with his complaints, telling him I’d worked in computers and had had the same experience with third party software many times, to which he responded he’d taken a few computing courses in university and asked me what programming languages I knew.

“You went to university?” I blurted out before I could stop myself, and learned I was talking to a recent graduate with a BA in English Literature. I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

Six years after putting telemarketing behind me forever, while my less obstreperous schoolmates were leaving university and taking jobs as waitresses, truck drivers, receptionists, and even telemarketers, I was working as a computer programmer at an insurance company, making enough money to support not only myself, but my deadbeat first husband, who never remained employed one second longer than it took him to qualify for unemployment insurance.  I’d scrambled my way up from the filing room in basement, via the first floor mail room, second floor telephone room and third floor claims department. It wasn’t an easy climb, but it taught me things I’d never have learned in school, where courses like “Buckling Down 101” and “Getting Your Ass in Gear 202” and “Taking Responsibility for Your Future – Advanced” are not on offer.  For some people, these are innate abilities. For a foul-mouthed, know-it-all like me, they were lessons that had to be bludgeoned in. I’ve always felt fortunate to have learned them while I was still young enough to benefit from them.

A few days after ordering my new PVR, I met up with a bunch of old-fogey friends and we had one of those kids-these-days conversations. If you’re over fifty, or know anyone over fifty, you’ve heard things like this before:   

Nowadays kids want two-hundred dollar running shoes and expect to be driven everywhere. When I was a kid, we walked to school barefoot. Five miles every day. Uphill. In blizzards.

We didn’t have Nintendo when I was a kid. We made our own fun with corn cobs and imagination.

Someone, I can’t remember who, pointed out that suspension from school was a dumb form of punishment. “Those kids don’t want to go to school anyway,” she said. “It’s like rewarding their bad behavior with a vacation.”

Not having any kids myself, and unwilling to voice an opinion on something I know nothing about, I’d been letting the talk flow around me. At this point, I felt I could join in the conversation. “Getting expelled from school,” I told them, “was the best career move I ever made.”  

 

Where Ideas Really Come From

Recently, people have been asking me, “Where do you get your ideas from?” As it happens, my current book has an impeccable pedigree. Future works, however, may not be as explicable.

At the end of an incredibly dull day last week, I decided to perk up my evening by checking out a free music concert down by the lake with a friend. We had no clue who was playing, but after the day I’d had, the local seniors’ kazoo band would have been an improvement. Shouldering our camp chairs, we made our way to the park, where it became apparent, from the number of cowboy hats dotting the audience, that we were in for a country and western evening.

I’m not a big fan of C&W. The music is energetic and pleasing in a predictable way, but the whiney, adenoidal delivery of the pity-party lyrics drives me crazy. A good C&W performer can make a love song sound like a last minute plea from death row. Still, given that the alternative would be sitting at home feeling sorry for myself, I was willing to be entertained by someone else’s pain. We set up our chairs on the weedless grass at the edge of the park.

(Surrealistically weedless - like none. This is utterly amazing, because two years ago, the province passed a law banning the sale and use of pesticides and herbicides. Since then, despite backbreaking hours of hand-pulling dandelions, plantain, thistles and vetch, my lawn and every other privately owned lawn in this town now looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland while government-owned property remains a lush monoculture of pristine blades. Is City Hall smuggling in bootleg weed killer from south of the border? If so, this would explain the shocking hike in my property tax bill.)

The headliner, Jason McCoy, stepped onto the stage. The crowd, which now filled the park and spilled out onto the streets around it, went wild. I was too far away to see what he looked liked – heck, I’d have had to be sitting on the stage to do that - but I googled him later and he’s firmly in the cowboy hunk category.  His first few songs were the standard busted-truck, dead-dog offerings delivered with an appropriate nasal twang. Then he launched into a song about never arguing with his wife in the interests of getting laid on a regular basis. The melody and chord structures were standard, but the lyrics were funny, and one line in particular struck me as unusually clever:

 “It’s a mighty fragile ego system.”

I immediately began plotting out a novel about an image obsessed couple who adopt a Chinese baby because it’s fashionable and the child turns out to be disabled in some obvious and unglamorous way. The instant I got home, I sat down at the laptop and looked up “fragile ego system” to see if my brilliant idea had already been commandeered.

I found a surprising number of articles, comments and blogs written by people apparently unaware that “eco” and “ego” are different words. (Okay, one of them is just a prefix. Even funnier, don’t you think?) The best was a set of council meeting minutes from a California town considering a new development. In addition to the ego/eco confusion, one woman “felt that annexations are inedible” and she “doesn’t want to see her rates go up farther [sic] and have water shortage and conservation because then have [sic] existing water is being adverted to the other side of the bridge.” I decided malapropism would make an excellent characteristic for my socially sensitive protagonists.

(For those of you who don’t have my twisted writer’s sense of humor, advert, when used as a verb, means to call attention to in speech or in writing. Picture a tour guide standing on bridge saying, “And if you will direct your attention to the other side of the bridge, ladies and gentlemen, you will see even more water.”)

Rock climbers in Virginia have named a difficult climb Fragile Ego System, which is, hilariously, located on Gonad Wall.  Hollywood and Brooklyn appear to be hotbeds of fragile ego systems, (Brooklyn? Really?) and it’s a fairly common derisive accusation flung about in forum bun-fights. The phrase is not, however, in the lyrics of any song. The actual line, that I finally found on a C&W website, goes like this:

“It’s a mighty fragile ecosystem.”

Before I write my novel about the disabled Chinese baby with malapropic parents, I’ll have to make up a story for when I’m asked where the idea came from. The truth makes no sense at all.

Rechecking the Sheep.

An artist and a scientist are walking along a country road. The artist stops by a field and exclaims, “Look at those beautiful white sheep grazing in the meadow!”

“You think so?” the scientist asks.

The artist is astonished. “You don’t think they are beautiful?”

“Well, they could be beautiful,” the scientist concedes. “I just don’t know if they’re all white.”

The artist studies the sheep, then says firmly, ”They’re all white.”

“No,” the scientist points out, “they’re all white on this side.”

Imagine a proof scale: 0 for leprechauns/eternal youth; 10 for death/taxes. Now think about where on the proof scale a concept must score before you believe in it. As far as I know, my ancestors never set foot in Missouri, but at heart, I’m a Missourian through and through. Before I trust that something is true, I must have personal experience or significant proof.

While the proof scale serves us well for empirically evaluated things like electricity and pound cake, it is all but useless when it comes to people. We are not perfect, or even consistent. People have even been known to obfuscate and outright lie for personal gain. And yet the urge to trust people is irresistible. We depend on each other for survival. The entire world suffers from a kind of Stockholm syndrome, our psyches split between the desire to trust and the fear of trusting too much.

The other day at the library, a man who appeared to be a good and nurturing father in all other respects (though he could have been a sadistic monster for all I knew) left me in charge of his disabled eleven year old foster son while he went out to his car to get his wallet. He trusted me for a score of 2 on the proof scale: older woman (1) who appeared to work at the library (1). Maybe a 3 if he knew internet volunteers must be vetted by the police. But he couldn’t have known I spent twenty years out of the country. I might have been a raging pedophile in the Netherlands, or even better India, which is where pedophiles go on sex vacations. Hell, I could have been one here in Canada who just hadn’t been caught yet. I’m not, of course, and spent my twenty minutes of custodial duty listening to obscure facts about Willie Wonka and Oompa Loompas while the boy, as open and trusting as his hero Charlie, surfed google images looking for the perfect picture of the Golden Ticket.

Most of us need a higher proof score than 2 or 3. We tippy-toe toward trust, sharing harmless personal tidbits about ourselves, weighing those we receive in return, keeping an ear out for rumor and gossip. Personally, I won’t offer trust for any score less than 9, and I award proof points grudgingly. You’re a heavily decorated war hero turned fireman who regularly risks your life running into burning buildings to rescue puppies? Maybe half a point - if I heard it from a reliable source.

Because I award proof points so sparingly, I am always shocked to learn my trust has been misplaced.

When I decided to try selling my book to a publisher, I had no idea how to go about it. Reluctantly, as anyone who has read my diatribes can attest, I turned to the internet. It took weeks of searching, evaluating, comparing, to find the voices I felt might be trustworthy. Then I spent more weeks reading through their blogs, winnowing out the overly optimistic. I like my advisors to be realists, willing call a spade a spade. Eventually, I settled on four agents and followed their advice slavishly, dotting every “i” and crossing every “t”. Their advice was sound and it worked.

Earlier this week, one of my publishing gods announced on their blog that their agency had opened an e-publishing branch. This is a pretty hot topic in publishing circles nowadays. Within minutes, the comments section filled with horrified exclamations about conflict of interest and accusations of scamming hopeful writers. I was incensed by this. How could they accuse this agent - this pillar of integrity whose sound advice had set the feet of so many writers, including this one's, firmly on the publishing path - of being a scammer?  I hopped over to the new e-publishing site, determined to collect ammunition that would prove those sniveling, ungrateful whiners wrong.

But I couldn’t, because the dismal list of services offered in exchange for a share of the profits are obtainable elsewhere, either for free or at a reasonable onetime cost. I know this because my writing buddy JR, whose techie chops were just above those of a banana slug when he got started, recently used them to e-publish his book. Devastated, I returned to the comments and read through my former hero’s feeble attempts to stem the tide of outrage, hoping to find some spark of honest explanation.  I found a lot of double-speak and yak-around, the same stuff that drove me out of corporate America into early retirement.

Here’s the saddest thing for me. This agency really does have something worthwhile to offer as a publisher: their nose for a good book. The list of clients they have helped find success in traditional publishing is long. Any book vetted by their agents is probably worth buying for those who enjoy reading in the genres they represent. If they had stuck with that, I’d have awarded them yet another proof point for honesty.  Instead, they chose to sound like every other scammer in the literary marketplace and I am reluctantly deducting  5 proof points from their score.

Times change.  Common wisdom becomes folly. Our circumstances, our needs, our goals, have all the permanence of those funky bubbles we blew through plastic rings when we were kids. So now I’m out in meadow, walking around all my other sheep, checking to see if they are still white on the other side.