01-Mar-2009
Iron Filings – 17
I have a modest sweet tooth – a little candy in the evening, a cookie now and then. We rarely have dessert when we eat out, and I don’t even put sugar on cereal. My favorite (right now; such things change) commercial cookie is Keebler’s Soft Batch Peanut Butter Cookies. My favorite candy is, oddly, a store brand in three basic varieties: Walgreen’s Chocolate Covered Peanuts, Walgreen’s Peanut Caramel Clusters, and Walgreen’s Chocolate Bridge Mix. Any idea where we’re going with this? You bet. I recently finished a package of the cookies (they last a while for me) and was in the middle of a bag of Peanut Caramel Clusters when I read that all four of my favorite delights had been recalled for possible salmonella contamination. I finished the Peanut Caramel Clusters. Really, I just had to.
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I am truly amazed at how people – actually, women; I have only found this to be true of women – can take something that at one time was raw wood pulp, then processed up into paper, then a paper bag, then bundled and thrown onto pallet and truck bed and distribution center warehouse floor until it is once again trucked to the storage room of your local supermarket, tossed onto a shelf, filled with your groceries and then placed into car trunk, truck bed, or back seat until getting home and being put on the kitchen floor or the kitchen counter – after all that then folded up nicely to await the moment when a batch of fresh cookies can be put on its much-traveled surface.
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Writers are often thought to be a negative bunch who spend a great deal of time pointing out all the evils of the world and all the things they dislike. I may be among that group or I may not. I haven’t thought about it that much. But at great risk to my writerly reputation I’ve decided to compile a list of things that I like, things that in their large or small way I find good about the world. Here it is: Netflix (a gospel I’ve preached with verve and conviction), Waterman pens, Honda motorcars, newspapers, Rhapsody (where I buy my tunes), The Sun Magazine, my snowblower, L.L. Bean, Chicago (the city), Hotmail, Beagles, Blue Bunny ice cream, Colin Firth, fleece sheets, coffee, Maria Bello, smoking, writing, walking, Barack Obama, chocolate, books, sandals, The Gettysburg Review, “The Office,” my Baxter State Parka, and pretty much everything to do with my family. What surprises me most is that the list is as long as it is.
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Simplify, we are told (this has been going on for a long time now). Our lives are full of
busywork and trivia. We need to cut ourselves down to the basics, the simple things. I’m not sure about that. Frankly, I think a cluttered life is kind of like a cluttered house, one filled with odd furniture, pictures, knick-knacks, the minor trash of this or that resident. But no matter where you turn something interesting pops out at you, something worth looking at or examining or asking questions about.
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Whatever happened to Adolphe Menjou?
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All of us, in one way or another, have an obligation to tell the story of our time – what it was like to live right here and right now. What did we do? How did we work? What did we eat? How did we love? Just imagine someone a hundred or more years from now wondering, Wow, what was it like to live in such a time? We can answer that question, but it’s not easy to do so. We have lots of professionals who attempt it (painters, writers, journalists, etc.), but I like to think the real stories are told by the family snapshooters, the Sunday afternoon poets, the midnight journalers, the diarists – even the man making space shuttle models out of toothpicks or the woman doing needlepoint pictures of her children. Every effort is important because we have no idea what will survive over time. The hermetically-sealed time capsule with its hundreds of computer disks may crumble under the weight of a new highway, while the letters to her son of Mrs. Schwartz down the block may survive for a thousand years.
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Of all the obligations we have, the one we fail most often and most miserably at is the obligation to be controversial.
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Two lady jocks talking at the grocery store: “I was just thinking of you.” “I was just thinking of you, too.” “We must have espn.”
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If God had wanted us to fly, He would have made the earth softer.
G. K. Wuori © 2009
Photoillustration by the author
