The Weekly Essay

It feels like summer’s fever has finally broken. The weather is just a little bit cooler, even if only by a few degrees, and this morning when I first stepped outside there was a cool breeze that definitely said, “Winter is coming.” Then it added, “Oh, it’ll be a couple of months at least before you have to turn on the heat or even get out blankets, and right now we’ve got a large low pressure system moving in an easterly direction,” but I went inside before the breeze could pull down a large complicated chart with the names of towns I only hear about when tornadoes hit.

With the change in the weather I feel like my dreams have gotten more vivid, or maybe the cold is waking me up out of them right in the middle of a REM cycle so they don’t fade away, although I have yet to sit up in bed asking, “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” George Carlin said, “There’s nothing more boring than listening to someone describe a dream.” That’s a sweeping generalization and I have to disagree—for one thing I think it depends on the dream, and for another George Carlin had obviously never taken an economics class in college. Granted most of the time when movies or TV shows have dream sequences they do seem pretty boring. Even if you can’t tell right away that it’s a dream sequence—even if the main character walking alone down a dark hallway or empty street in broad daylight, or the unusual camera angles, or everyone around them speaking really slowly, isn’t an immediate giveaway usually they’ll be stabbed or die in some way, or something so far out of the story’s parameters will happen that it won’t come as any surprise to us in the audience when the main character sits up in bed and says, “Oh, the scriptwriter needed something to pad out the runtime!”

Like I said, though, there are exceptions—times in movies or TV shows where dream sequences can move the plot forward or just provide insight into the characters, like that haunting M*A*S*H episode from the eighth season where Houlihan, Hunnicutt, Colonel Potter, Winchester, Father Mulcahy, Klinger, and Hawkeye, catching brief naps during a surgical marathon, all have disquieting or outright terrifying dreams that reveal some of their deepest fears. I just looked up that episode. It was titled “Dreams” and was supposed to end with a cut scene where Hawkeye sits up in his cot and says, “You’d think the scriptwriter could have come up with a more original title!”

I still remember a dream from when I was just four years old. I was outside our house under the naked yellow bulb over the garage door, which was locked. I couldn’t get in. I went into the backyard. It seemed like night but I could see the outline of the round sun surrounded by triangular arms, a slightly lighter shade of blue against the dark sky, as though it had been painted over. I went to the front of the house. We had a long front yard that sloped down to the street. I wasn’t allowed to cross the street but in the dream I knew it was safe. I looked up over the house across the street and could see the moon and all the cars in the world driving around it.

It was late summer when I had that dream. The next day I told my friend Paul, who lived next door about it. He said, “Oh yeah? I had a dream too that there were tigers and polar bears in my room. They were biting me!”

Paul’s dream sounded pretty boring, especially compared to mine. For a long time I thought maybe it meant I was more imaginative, maybe even smarter than he was, but in the cold morning breeze I don’t think so. We each have our own dreams and mine might have sounded boring to him too.   

It’s been hot lately. I know this isn’t news—a lot of people have been living through a heat wave recently and I realize how lucky we are to have air conditioning. It really hit home when our home AC couldn’t keep up and had to take a break. The temperature inside the house started rising to meet the temperature outside and I had Elvis’s “Burning Love” playing on repeat in my head, but it was a 78 and my overheated brain could only manage 33 RPMs so it sounded like it was being sung by a drunk Orson Welles, but that’s another story.

My wife suggested I check under the house to see if the ductwork was okay. I’m not a DIY guy. My first approach to most home repair projects is to call someone, which can be embarrassing when I end up paying them seventy-five bucks to tell me, “Uh, sir, all you really need to do is plug this toaster in.” But I figured there was no harm in looking so I crawled up into the crawlspace with a flashlight. The first thing I noticed was that I needed a winter coat to go in there. The second thing I noticed is that a couple of the connectors that attached the ducts to the vents had collapsed. The third thing I noticed, which, technically, was the first thing I noticed because I notice it every time I crawl into the crawlspace, is that I really don’t mind being down there. I’m not going to build a summer retreat or office in the crawlspace , or even spend the night, especially when it’s cold enough to store meat down there, but if something needs to be done or if we ever need the half a bicycle that’s down there for some reason I’m okay with working in the cramped undercarriage of the house.

And a little casual perusal and some online videos convinced me this DIY was one I could DIMyself. The first, and most ridiculous, thing I learned is that duct tape is not made for heating and cooling ducts any more than it’s made for mallards, but a quick trip to the hardware store equipped me with everything I needed.

This reminded me of one of my first jobs out of college. I was working in a library mailroom. Down the hall was the office of a construction company. They did building maintenance and the construction guys and I would pass each other in the hallways, or we’d see each other in the basement while I was loading boxes to be shipped out.

One of the construction guys, Jack, said to me, “Why don’t you get a real job?”

To be clear in my mailroom job I did a lot of heavy lifting, moving, shelving. Maybe Jack didn’t know how heavy books can be because he’d never picked one up, but I don’t know why what I did was any less of a “real job” than construction work.

A few months after that a woman I worked with hired the construction company to redo her bathroom. Jack and another guy showed up at her house and, as she told us, after a few hours of tearing things down they got into an argument. Both stormed out and she couldn’t get anyone else from the construction company to finish the job. She couldn’t get a refund of her deposit either.

I didn’t see much of Jack after that.

After a few hours of crawling around, taping, cutting, and adjusting I had the ducts successfully reconnected and I went around making sure I hadn’t missed anything, taping up a few other loose spots.

I was very thorough, finished everything that needed to be done, and didn’t get paid anything for it. I still think it was a real job.

The dentist found a small cavity lurking at the back of my mouth. It’s hidden at the base of the last tooth on the left side of the bottom row, pretty much the worst possible place to have a cavity because no matter how wide I open my mouth it’s difficult to get to. It seems like it’s a punishment for me trying to lighten the mood of my routine cleaning. When the hygienist asked me if I’d been taking care of my teeth I said, “Oh, yeah, I brush twice a day, floss, and take care of my teeth, aside from sleeping with a mouthguard full of gummy bears.”

I was hoping the cavity would be in one of my remaining wisdom teeth. I’ve only had one of my wisdom teeth pulled so I’m either mostly wise or not—I’ve never figured out how that works. The first kid I knew to get his wisdom teeth pulled was Carl, in my seventh grade class, and it seemed like he came back the next day even dumber than before, hard to believe as that was. The one wisdom tooth I had pulled had a cavity in it and my dentist said, “Let’s just go ahead and take it out,” and I was fine with that because going into my mouth with a pair of pliers and yanking a tooth out by the roots seemed preferable to going in with a drill, in much the same way that hitting my thumb with a sledgehammer is preferable to pouring gasoline on my hand and setting it on fire.

I’m also still chasing that dragon that was the first time I got teeth pulled. I was in the second grade and had a few stubborn baby teeth that, unwisely, weren’t willing to be taken by the Tooth Fairy. My mother took me to a special pediatric orthodontist who gave me a mask full of nitrous and his own special mix of codeine, ether, and banana peels, and within a few minutes I was having hallucinations of ballerinas and scary parrots that Aldous Huxley would have envied. I was vaguely aware of the orthodontist doing something but it seemed like it was happening at my feet so I didn’t worry about it.

It was a year or so later that I had to have another stubborn baby tooth pulled—I guess they didn’t have enough ether the first time—and I was really looking forward to another ride on John Fogerty’s flying spoon, but it was a different orthodontist. Still I walked in and said, “All right, Doctor Leary, let’s drop some windowpane!” But he put a needle in my arm, started a sodium pentothal drip, and told me to count backward from one-hundred. I think I got to ninety-seven and woke up on the couch at home with a mouth full of gauze and a weird feeling in my feet.

When my current dentist pulled my wisdom tooth I was mostly conscious and while it wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience at least the nitrous and some Hendrix blasting in my ears provided a purple haze.

Since this new cavity isn’t in a wisdom tooth—it wasn’t smart enough for that, or maybe I should name it Carl—it’s going to have to be drilled and filled, although my dentist also floated the two most terrifying words you can hear from someone with a DDS: root canal. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’ve never had a root canal but I understand having a cavity drilled and filled is preferable, in the way that pouring gasoline on your hand and setting it on fire is preferable to jamming an ice pick in your eye via your left nostril.

So now I’m dreading the follow-up appointment but at least I can take some comfort in being able to eat anything I want—caramel wrapped in cotton candy, frozen concentrated orange juice, rock candy, actual rocks. Maybe by the time I go in I’ll get the good stuff.

Source: Instagram, Jim Benton

There’s a question that’s been on my mind for most of my life: what exactly is cottage cheese? This came to the forefront when a friend of mine told me cottage cheese is making a comeback. I never knew it had a going away. I thought it was always there. The idea that it’s suddenly become hip or trendy sounds like fashionistas saying, “The big new thing this season is air! Breathe it in!” I nearly said “water” but then I remembered that there’s tap, sparkling, spring, mineral, well, distilled, alkaline, infused, and reverse osmosis. I’m sure every season trend-makers get together to decide which one is “in” and there’s a water cycle you don’t learn about in school unless you go to advertising school, but that’s another story.

At some point I realized cottage cheese was just curds and whey with a different label, but “curds and whey” has a negative association with Miss Muffet and spiders so advertisers got together and came up with an alternate name, something that would sound more benign, and you can’t get much more benign than a cottage, a little home in the woods, unless you happen to be Hansel and Gretel. I’m sure “cottage cheese” was a term that got picked up at a time when more people were moving to the cities which led to a faux nostalgia for rural life which city people mistakenly assumed was simpler, far from the madding crowd and all that.

I also know I’m exaggerating the role of some advertising cabal, a proto-Don Draper who looked at a big bowl of curds and whey and said, “The only way to sell this is to rebrand it.” I know the term “cottage cheese” was probably just a common term that people used—a shorter way of saying “we were going to make cheddar but ran out of time, so how about some of this slop?” That’s why there’s not a specific brand of cottage cheese—it’s a general term.

I can’t remember when it was that I finally decided to eat cottage cheese but I’m pretty sure it was in my early teens. For a long time it scared me a little. I didn’t think it was going to attack me, although at times it did seem like something horrible could be hiding under those lumps, but, like a lot of kids, I was weird about food. I didn’t like ketchup or mustard, in spite of never having tried them, and I couldn’t go near hot dogs for a long time after I made the mistake of looking one in the eye. I loved green olives and could eat an entire jar but I preferred them without the pimentos—although I’d still eat one after looking it in the eye. And I wouldn’t eat pimento cheese because it looked like cheese that had been processed by someone who got their hand caught in the grater. Taste is a funny thing. Things I didn’t like, or thought I wouldn’t like, when I was a kid I now enjoy. I put mustard on hot dogs, and also ketchup, to the horror of my Chicago friends, but I’ve never developed a taste for tomatoes or green peppers.

When I did finally try cottage cheese, at an age when I was starting to be more adventurous, I was surprised that it was pretty good. It wasn’t so good that I regretted not trying it sooner—there were other foods I felt that way about—but it wasn’t bad. It’s just there.

Source: Wikipedia

It’s taken me almost forty years but I’ve finally read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Blume was part of a trinity of authors whose books I read most growing up. The other two were Beverly Cleary and Betsy Byars. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that all three happened to be women and, at first, I didn’t specifically look for books by them. We’d get the Weekly Reader that had brief book descriptions or watch the PBS show Cover To Cover, and if a book sounded interesting to me I’d go to the library and look for it. We also had a lot of books by Cleary, Byars, and Blume around the house, and my friends passed them around.

As I said maybe it was a coincidence that most of the books I was reading were written by women and Blume, like the others, was just as good at writing from a boy’s perspective as she was at writing from a girl’s perspective. After I read Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge—which focused on a boy named Peter Hatcher—I went on to Otherwise Known As Sheila The Great, which is, obviously, about a girl named Sheila.

Somewhere in there I also read Freckle Juice, which is a much lighter story, and it didn’t even stick with me that it was one of Blume’s books but, looking back, I realize it deals with one of her major themes: the wild, often inexplicable things kids will do to fit in.

Then, in fifth grade, and specifically starting to look for Judy Blume books, I picked up Blubber, which was a book that challenged me in a lot of ways. It wasn’t a conventional narrative but more anecdotal, which felt like it was really capturing the way my own young mind worked, focusing intensely on whatever was happening in the moment. It’s also a book that deals, often brutally, with bullying, but is unusual in that its narrator is one of the bullies. Jill, the protagonist, doesn’t want to single out her classmate Linda but, under the influence of the most popular girl in her class, she doesn’t resist, either, until the end. Blubber doesn’t have a clear moral message, but that’s what makes it such a great book: it asks readers to draw their own conclusions about group power dynamics and how quickly those can shift as Jill goes from bullying to being the one bullied. I ended up rereading it several times because it spoke to me in a way few other books did. Then there was the ending—seemingly happy, but without a tidy resolution.

It also had the words “damn” and “ass” in it and, hard as it is to believe now, those were shocking words to encounter in a young adult novel, but they also added to the realism, the sense that Judy Blume wasn’t condescending; she understood what kids are like.

At the beginning of sixth grade I found Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret on the shelf of my English classroom. Hey, another Judy Blume novel. I started reading it and was really enjoying it up until Margaret and her friends talk about whether they’ve had their periods.

I thought I knew what a period was: the dot at the end of a sentence. Or a vague measure, as in a “period of time”. What Margaret and her friends were talking about was something different, something I didn’t understand, though I had a vague idea that it was important to girls. So I asked a girl. Beth and I sat at the same table in English class and, not really aware of what I was doing, I just asked her, “Can you tell me what a period is?”

She stared at me with piercing, pale blue eyes. Then laughed. Then ran to another table and hissed, “Chris doesn’t know what a period is!” More laughter.

It would be oversimplifying to say I became a class joke. Most of the girls in my class, even Beth, laughed about it for a few days then dropped it. Most of the guys did too. But a few, their own little gang, thought it was funny to catch me alone, on the playground, or just sitting by myself drawing or reading, and surround me.

“Hey Chris, do you know what a period is? Do you know what a…pussy is? Do you know what a dick is? Do you know if you’ve got one?” And then they’d laugh menacingly.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew what they were talking about. I just didn’t want to talk about it. Looking back I wonder what would have happened if I’d laughed back at them and said something like, “If you’re so smart why don’t you tell me?” That might have worked or it might not. Eventually most of them left me alone but one kid, Tommy, kept bugging me, and didn’t stop until I started hitting back and the teachers kept us separated.

It was through that experience that I reread Blubbler, and I wish I’d finished Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret too. I wish I hadn’t felt so humiliated I couldn’t pick up the book for years. Obviously menstruation isn’t something I ever had to deal with personally, but my ignorance shouldn’t have been turned into a joke. And aside from that I could relate to Margaret struggling to fit in with her friends, to fit in anywhere, while also wanting to be herself. That I could understand, even at the time. The years between ten and thirteen were difficult—not that other years haven’t been, but one of the advantages of getting older is experience provides a context for our experiences. Judy Blume’s books helped me put into words, or at least process, changes I’d never been through before, and would, thankfully, never have to go through again. They made me feel less alone while they also allowed me to draw my own conclusions.

Summer’s more than half over. That’s what I discovered when, for no reason I can explain, I suddenly stopped and asked myself, When exactly is midsummer? And myself replied, Why are you asking me? You’ve been asking yourself this question every summer, usually around this time, since you were eight, but now you’ve got the internet and you can just look up the answer. Although when you were a kid you could have asked an adult. Sure, some of them might not have known, and some would have thought it was funny to give you an answer like “The thirty-eighth of Cunegonde.” And don’t you feel stupid for not finding out you could ask questions like this at the reference desk in the library until your senior year of college so you spent a lot of time trying to find information on your own?

This is why I don’t talk to myself as much as I used to.

Even though I did wonder when exactly midsummer was when I was a kid most of the time I was too immersed in the joy of summer to stick with the question long enough to ever stop to ask anyone. Besides I didn’t want to waste time worrying about when summer would slip into its downhill slide. That time would come soon enough. I remember the summer morning when I was nine or ten and I woke up and heard neighbors shooting off fireworks. Fireworks were supposed to be for the fourth of July, I thought, so why were they having a breakfast snap, crackle, and pop that had nothing to do with cereal in their driveway? Then I went downstairs and saw the newspaper on the kitchen table and realized it was the third of July—the entire month of June was gone and I hadn’t even noticed. Also that was the previous day’s newspaper, although I’d walk around most of that day still thinking it was the third.

Also when I was a kid seasons seemed very arbitrary. Then I grew up and learned more about how the world worked and came to understand that seasons are completely arbitrary. When I was a kid summer started when school ended, and most of the time that was sometime in late May, but, according to the meteorological calendar, summer this year started June 1^st, with midsummer falling on June 24^th. Of course when I was a kid autumn didn’t start when school started, which was usually in late August. Summer vacation might be over but as long as the weather was warm and humid we were still in summer. Depending on the weather I wouldn’t think of it as autumn until sometime in early winter.

We’ve had a very mild, at times almost cold, summer this year, with it only just now starting to get really hot. I wear jeans and a hoodie in the house because I’m cold-blooded and we keep the air conditioning pretty well cranked up most of the time, but when I step out into the sunshine and still keep the hoodie on because it’s a bit cool that, to me, is just not summer. In fact it’s been so cool for most of June that one morning, when it should have been sweltering but was actually chilly, I yelled up at the sky, “You could turn down the air conditioning a little!” I knew it wouldn’t change anything, of course, and I even wondered why I was doing it, but I know better than to ask myself questions like that.