When you lift a new pair of slippers out of their box, the first thing you notice (besides the extensive packaging) is that they appear to be identical. There is no right, and there is no left. They're programmable.
So you make a choice and begin the process of training them to fit your feet, or maybe it's training your feet to fit them, I'm not sure, until the day inevitably comes when you mix them up as you get dressed in the dark. Your feet instantly tell you how to fix that story.
As long as you don't think too deeply about it, living is a bit like breaking in a new pair of slippers.
I was not aware of this until recently, when I could suddenly feel my old slippers again and it mattered after many months which one was right and which one was left.
It's called "peripheral neuropathy" when you lose the feeling in your extremities. The doctor taps the reflex hammer on your knee and foot but nothing happens. The jerk has come out of your knee. It is common after a stroke.
Not to worry. Physical therapists, or the Internet, can teach you how to get that feeling back. It's the kind of exercise that hurts just enough to actually feel good. (Now if only I could make my left hand close all the way again.)
And it's too bad, isn't it, that no one has developed an exercise for when your love goes away.
***
Today, listening to the train whistles as they pass nearby, I'm sensitive to how I'm learning new habits, adjusting to the confinement.
Perhaps, once the shelter-in-place orders are lifted, some of these new habits will persist. Maybe we will each travel a little lighter on the earth, easing the burdens we impose upon it as it spins through space avoiding most of the asteroids in its way.
I remember a sheet posted in the kitchen at one place I worked. It had pictures and words. "Compost these items (food scraps, etc.); Recycle these items (look for a the appropriate symbol); Place the rest in the trash."
The sign's creator couldn't resist an editorial comment: "Almost nothing should go into the trash."
Since helping my 9-year-old granddaughter with her math schoolwork is one of my new habits, I'm acutely aware of the relationship between numerators and denominators. Consider the numbers that flash daily on TV regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. The fraction appears pretty alarming. about 50,000 in the U.S. dead out of a total of some 200,000 cases.
That is an extremely alarming death rate -- 25 percent.
But we do not yet have any real data about the denominator because so few people have been tested. It could well be the case that the true number of cases to date is 1,000,000. In that case the fatality rate would be 5 percent.
Or, even more likely, maybe the denominator is 5 million cases, bringing the death rate down to 1 percent. Or lower.
This is the kind of situation that can be a reminder of why we tell children that math matters.
As a journalist who strives for fairness, I consider it downright irresponsible for networks like CNN to flash those incremental numbers on the screen day after day. Corona-V may be bad, very bad, but it is certainly not killing one in every four people who contract it.
***
Another programmable element in our lives arrives in the form of election ballots. They're sort of like slippers, they don't arrive pre-set for the right or the left. Nothing compels us to vote the way we've voted previously.
There are many positions on this year's ballot, including the job of the president. If I could wish for one political mutation, it would be that a meaningful percentage of voters consider their choice with an open mind this time around.
If that should happen, if people set aside resentments and prejudices, they will cast a vote for the person best-suited to the job, free from passion.Aristotle proposed something like that.
Whatever your choice, just tap your finger and be glad that peripheral neuropathy hasn't taken your voice away -- yet.
***
The night before last, one of the quail chicks popped up in the air and landed outside of the box. Disoriented, it scrambled around the bathroom, peeping loudly. Now, its box has a soft netting ceiling.
That chick was the only one to date to escape from its box; expressed as a fraction or percentage, that comes to 1 out of 16, or 6.7 percent.
If that were to happen in an election, the result would be a landslide. Most everyone stays in their box. Few have whatever you want to call it -- recklessness, courage, foolishness, restlessness, physical prowess, cabin fever -- to try and escape.
Writers, filmmakers, songwriters all notice that and the results include movies like "Thelma and Louise." I don't like that movie because of how it concludes. I'd write a new ending. Wait a little while. Someone will come to put you back in your box, or you'll will find a new box somewhere out there that's a better fit.
Of course some people never do find a box until the last scene. They keep moving down the line until the line stops. One of many haunting pieces on my playlist is "Travelin' Soldier" by the Dixie Chicks:
"Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his army green
Sat down in a booth in a café there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair
He's a little shy so she give him a smile
And he said, "Would you mind sittin' down for a while
And talking to me?
I'm feeling a little low."
She said, "I'm off in an hour and I know where we can go."
So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said, "I bet you got a boyfriend but I don't care.
I got no one to send a letter to.
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you?"
I cried
Never gonna hold the hand of another guy
Too young for him they told her
Waitin' for the love of a travelin' soldier
Our love will never end
Waitin' for the soldier to come back again
Never more to be alone when the letter said
A soldier's coming home"
Since we're all going to end up in a box, maybe we should just jump now and again. Almost nothing should go into the trash.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment