The Weekly Essay

Source: Giphy

There’s a trend I’ve noticed in commercials of showing people whose whole lives, even whole identities, are built around their careers. It’s not a new trend, nor is it particularly widespread, but it seems to have spread to fast food workers, which is strange and may even be insidious. I spent a summer working at a Shoney’s, a chain that’s rapidly disappearing, but, for those who don’t know it, is best described as a fast food place with printed menus and someone who brings your food to your table rather than making you go to a counter to order it. In spite of presenting itself as a sit-down restaurant, complete with a breakfast bar in the mornings that switched over to a salad bar after eleven in the morning—with the dirty secret that some of the salad bar food was sitting under the breakfast bar food, in case anyone ever wondered why the black olives were so warm—the wait staff were supposed to subtly pressure customers to get their food and get out as quickly as possible. People would sometimes ask a waitress to hold their food so they could spend a little time enjoying the salad bar and maybe give the Jell-o a chance to cool down, but behind the scenes management would penalize waitresses if they didn’t deliver plates to the table in under ten minutes.

So that’s my entire background in the food service industry but, contrary to what some commercials want you to think, I doubt any fast food place is really a fun place to work with wacky employees getting up to various hijinks with each other. I hope everyone, no matter what job they do, can find some joy and maybe even fulfillment in it, but for me and pretty much everyone else who worked at that Shoney’s it seemed we all just wanted to get through our shifts without getting ptomaine or bitten by the rats in the dry storage room and go onto whatever waited us outside the restaurant walls.

The insidious part of the commercials, I think, is not just that they want customers to feel better about going to fast food places but they want to convey the idea that, hey, it’s low-paying drudgery and probably no benefits or sick leave even if you get ptomaine, but at least there’s wacky hijinks to be had.

And to be clear: if you work in fast food and really enjoy what you do that’s great. I’m not knocking anyone’s career choice. I’m knocking the upper management belief that a sense of corporate community and pulling together for the good of the shareholders is a substitute for benefits, decent wages, and even decent treatment—which is an easy belief to hold when you’re pulling down three figures and don’t even know the names of most of the people you manage.

The commercial trope of people who devote their whole lives to their work, funny enough, seems to be more common for insurance. Maybe that’s because insurance is, for most of us, something we don’t think about all the time but it can literally be a lifesaver when we need medical care, or really handy to have when we have a car accident, house fire, or other catastrophe. Insurance commercials work hard to convince us that there are people out there who devote their whole lives, every waking and even every sleeping moment, to lowering your premiums while also working to make sure you’re completely covered if you have a flood or a meteor hits your home. It’s reassuring even if, not so deep down, we all know it’s hogwash.

What’s really funny to me, because I have a weird sense of humor and a degree in English, is the poet Wallace Stevens worked as an insurance agent. It was one of those dual lives you rarely hear about—the sort I’m not sure can even exist anymore, since, even in the real, non-commercial world, only celebrities seem able to manage multiple careers, and even they can only manage that because they can afford to hire someone to design the clothes, the makeup, the power tools they slap their names and faces on.

Sometimes I even envy Wallace Stevens, who I think was in the perfect position—successful enough as an insurance agent that he got to a pretty high level in the company where he worked, and at the same time one of the most widely read and respected American poets of the twentieth century. Imagine being at a cocktail party and saying to someone, “Here’s my card if you need an insurance agent, and here’s my other card if you need two-hundred and forty lines of enigmatic language on the Aurora Borealis.”

The second-most popular Christmas story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, is really a ghost story, harkening back to the times when Christmas celebrations included the telling of tall and frightening tales. In 1891 the humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”

And even earlier than that, in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale the character Mamillius says, “A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one/Of sprites and goblins.” And it makes sense that a holiday that falls in the darkest days of the year used to be a time when people would sit around the fire and do their best to scare each other.

It’s a tradition that some want to see return, and it’s not hard to find Christmas movies that have a dark edge to them. The 1984 film Gremlins is set during what should be an idyllic Christmas in a small snow-covered town and in 1988 Scrooged would offer a darker take on the Dickens classic. Before that there was the 1974 slasher Black Christmas, directed by the same Bob Clark who’d go on to direct A Christmas Story with its own terrifying vision of Santa and the horrors of Ovaltine. Dr. Seuss’s classic How The Grinch Stole Christmas might not seem scary but, let’s face it, the title character is a monster and doesn’t even wear pants, and then there’s The Nightmare Before Christmas that pulls double-duty as both a Christmas and Halloween film.

It’s Christmas songs–a few of them at least–that really capture the spirit of the season. Just consider some of these classics, some of which deserve more play time:

Christmas At Ground Zero–Weird Al’s original 1986 Christmas tune was perfect for us Cold War kids who gathered around the tree with glowing faces and worried those same faces were going to be melted off under mushroom cloud. Ten years later Weird Al would follow that up with The Night Santa Went Crazy, but both tunes have a truly timeless quality to them.

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer–Almost too obvious to even be mentioned this classic, originally released in 1979, has it all: a drunk grandmother, an unlicensed Santa, football, beer, playing cards, and a Christmas celebration that goes on as normal in spite of the family matriarch flattened in the snow.

Santa’s Lament–So much is asked of Santa that it seems only fair that he should ask for a little in return, as Father Guido Sarducci reminded us on this track that isn’t well known enough.

Father Christmas–Of course The Kinks would offer up a cheerful, upbeat tune about a sidewalk Father Christmas collecting money for charity who gets mugged by a bunch of kids who demand money, a machine gun, and jobs for their fathers.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer–Not many people would think of this as a dark story, but consider the subtext: Rudolph has a mild deformity that causes the other reindeer to ostracize him, and Santa won’t even have anything to do with him until his lone feature makes him useful. It’s also an eerily prescient story since Rudolph’s red nose is probably caused by Chernobyl.

Frosty The Snowman–Another one that most people don’t think of as a dark story but here you don’t even need to consider the subtext. A magical hat brings a snowman to life and it’s all fun and games until the mercury rises and his face and everything else melt, causing him to die a painful but mercifully quick death on a sunny day. Merry Christmas, kids!

When Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” he was in southern California, far from any snow or cold weather, and I think that’s fitting. It seems to me a cold, snowy Christmas is best enjoyed in the imagination. Of course growing up in Tennessee I can’t remember ever seeing a white Christmas. I can remember plenty of cold Christmases, and one Christmas we spent in Florida where I happily spent all day walking around in shorts and I distinctly remember dreaming about jellyfish coming in through the windows and rolling marbles all over the house which I wish Irving Berlin had written a song about because it would be so much better, but that’s another story.

I also remember plenty of rainy Christmases, which I don’t think anyone dreams of, unless they’re in the southern hemisphere where December is the middle of summer and maybe they’re hoping for a break in a drought.

Maybe I’m thinking of this because it seems like every free weekend I’ve had since mid-October–in other words six months after stores started putting out Christmas decorations–it’s been raining, which pretty much leaves me stuck at home. Any weekend when I could go for a hike or go to a local park, or go to a local park and hike, it’s been raining and when it’s raining all I really want to do is crawl into bed and stay there until it’s dry. It’s affecting my brain which is affecting my mood, which is mostly controlled by my brain.

It’s also bringing up memories of a particularly rainy Christmas when an aunt and uncle came and stayed with us and they brought cousin Kevin.

I’ve said some bad things about cousin Kevin but the truth is he wasn’t a bad guy. He was like eggnog: great in small amounts but if you drink too much it turns cloying, then gummy, then leads to serious intestinal problems and there’s another Christmas no one dreams of and everyone would like to forget.
To get back to counsin Kevin, one summer when we went up to stay with my aunt and uncle at their house cousin Kevin and I had been hanging out for a few hours when he said, “You know, you’ve turned into a pretty cool guy,” which made me really happy. Of course then he added, “The last time I saw you you were short and whiny and your butt stuck out.” And I’m sure if you asked cousin Kevin about me he’d have a few negative things to say about me too. For instance that same summer he told me he had some chores around the house but he’d been putting them off until we arrived so I could help him. The next morning while he was still asleep I slipped out for a walk in the woods so Kevin had to mop the basement floor and clean the outdoor grill and wash the breakfast dishes by himself.

Whether that was annoying or completely justified depends on your point of view.

The Christmas that cousin Kevin came and stayed with us it rained nonstop from the moment he arrived, as though he brought his own personal storm cloud, until the day after Christmas. Fortunately we had, among other things, an Intellivision game console, which cousin Kevin quickly became obsessed with, and also for my birthday, a few days before Christmas, he gave me a set of some really cool fantasy choose-your-own-adventure books. Having worked through them himself cousin Kevin even helped guide me through a couple of them, which was like a cross between Dungeons & Dragons and eggnog.

Then, on the 23rd of December, the Intellivision broke. No one did anything to it–maybe it was a power surge, maybe it was a loose wire, or maybe it just couldn’t take cousin Kevin anymore. By then cousin Kevin had lost interest in the choose-your-own-adventure books but he wouldn’t leave me alone to enjoy them by myself, preferring instead to follow me all over the house complaining about the broken Intellivision, his dismay saturating everything like the nonstop rain outside, and

and if I had a nickel for every time he said, “This really sucks” I could have bought him a first-class ticket home.

So anyway I woke up on the morning of the 26th preparing to scour the house for more nickels when I realized it wasn’t raining. In fact the sun was out. I put on a winter coat and went outside. The air was cold but refreshingly crisp and the ground, starting to dry out, was springy. I walked up to the vacant lots at the top of the hill behind our house and wandered for hours among small cedar trees and rocks sparkling with frost. There were small pools covered with milky ice, patches of brittle, tawny grass, and fluffy birds that chirped at me from bare branches.

And the best part is cousin Kevin had been asleep when I went out so he got stuck washing the breakfast dishes by himself.

Fall is the season of death and sleep. It’s also the season of the harvest, which is why we put all the feasting holidays at the end of the year. It also used to be the time when the place where I worked would have an annual challenge for employees to maintain our weight. They called it “Hold The Stuffing”. We’d gather in various locations to be weighed and then, in January, we’d be weighed again, and if we hadn’t gained more than two pounds over the holidays we’d get a prize. That’s how it started, anyway. The first few years everyone who kept their weight gain under the limit got a gift card. Then it got downgraded to a keychain or a pen. Then they decided even that was too expensive so they changed it so that there was no longer an automatic reward. Instead everyone who didn’t gain was entered in a raffle for a gift card. Looking back I wish I’d stuck with it because at that point so many people dropped out that my chances of winning were pretty good, but then they were raffling off five gift cards and only five people entered so they dropped the program entirely.

Besides fall and winter are a time when it’s natural that we should put on a few extra pounds—maybe even more than two. As the weather gets colder we start layering on sweaters and hats and wool socks and electric blankets and it makes sense that our bodies add on a few extra layers too. We also burn more calories in cold weather, since our bodies need fuel to fire up the core when the surrounding temperature drops, and with all the holiday goodies that get set out it can be really easy to overcompensate for the loss.

I’m just extrapolating wildly here but I believe holiday feasts date back to when we were still hunter-gatherers, nomadic creatures who hadn’t yet learned to store food for the long term so, like bears, we’d bulk up for the winter months, although we never gained the ability to hibernate since we originated in a pretty warm climate. Still we learned the art of preservation by drying, salting, smoking, and even canning before recorded history, so nibbling, and even occasionally gorging, all through that time of year when the days grow noticeably shorter and the nights get longer, when all the harvesting has been done but it’s still too soon to start planting for the next year.

Fall especially is a transitory time, a time of change, which is why it’s ironic that I’m thinking about how deeply rooted some of our traditions are—how the human tendency to have winter feasts in preparation for the pre-spring famine have been with us maybe as long as we’ve been humans, maybe even longer. And it’s not so ironic that I think about how a dieting program at work went by the wayside, burned away by the harsh realities of dark winter nights when our natural inclination is to gather around the fires and stuff ourselves.

There’s something about this time of year that just saps all the energy out of me. I wonder if it has something to do with the time change. Suddenly we go from starting to get light in the mornings when I get up to it still being dark when I start work. It doesn’t help that the days are getting shorter. It’s as though I’m solar powered and my batteries aren’t getting fully charged.

And yet I like the dark. There’s something special about seeing the sun, that’s moved to the south, set early. The cooler weather makes the sky brighter and clearer; the stars seem closer at this time of year.

The cold doesn’t bother me either. This is the time of year when we switch from cooling the house to heating it. There’s that short period when the furnace fires up for the first time in months and there’s a distinct burning smell that goes through the whole house. That doesn’t sound appealing but somehow it is. It’s the sign that the weather is really changing, that we’re moving into the time of year when the holidays start, when everything winds down, when the pace gets a little slower. School days are far behind me but when I was in school this was a time when even the teachers took a more relaxed attitude. The pace might pick up a bit after Thanksgiving but it would slow down again as Christmas approached. This was in spite of, or maybe because of, final exams—the lessons could drift a bit so we could have time to prepare, to really absorb all that we’d already crammed into the exciting, energetic fall days when everything was still new.

Then, this morning, there was frost on the car’s windshield. I was already running late and it was just one more thing to deal with. And yet I was okay with it. It just meant I had to take a little extra time, relax, and let the car’s engine warm up before I finally set off for work. I was fine with that. It’s that time of year. There was no need to rush.

I had an epiphany this morning, which is the worst possible time to have an epiphany because there’s so much happening in the morning that most early epiphanies I have get lost in the shuffle of getting ready for the day. I do keep a notepad and pen next to the bed but, unfortunately, I rarely write anything on it. Or I wake up in the morning to find I’ve written down something like, “I tried my hand at gambling and lost an arm and a leg,” which is neither an epiphany nor particularly useful. Or there was the time I woke up to find I’d written down “Invention idea: DormWallz, a board students can put up in dorm rooms they can write things on or stick pictures to.” So apparently at some time during the night I’d invented the whiteboard, which seems less like an epiphany and, at best, more like a phany.

And it’s also a Monday and since I go in to work on Mondays I’m even busier and more stressed in the mornings than I am most other days of the week because I still have to get the dogs fed and taken out, then I have to get showered and dressed and in the car so I can get to work on time. Four days of working from home plus the weekend, I’ve realized, is just enough time to forget how much less flexible my schedule is when I have to be in the office. I have to be there at a specific time and it’s harder to do something like take a long lunch and then make up the time by working later in the afternoon because I also have to be home at a certain time. I could, once I got home and got the dogs fed and taken out, fire up the computer and get some work done. For that matter I could wake up in the middle of the night and go to work. First thing in the morning there are always questions waiting for me. But I like to keep my work and home schedules separate as much as I can and I know mixing them up would lead to madness.

None of this is this morning’s epiphany. What I realized this morning is that I like Daylight Savings Time. I like the time change. For several days now I’ve been getting up in the dark, doing most of my morning routine in the dark, and even starting work in the dark.

This morning I woke up to light. I left for work in the light.

I know it won’t last. The days will keep getting shorter and if it isn’t dark when I leave for work next week it will be the week after that. But gaining an hour made a difference today.