The Weekly Essay

My wife is trying to keep me from turning to a life of crime.

That’s actually the end of a long and winding train of thought so let me back up a few cars and start over instead of just giving you the caboose, especially since I notice most trains don’t even have cabooses anymore and anyway the proper plural is cabeese.

My wife knitted me an octopus hat. It’s a really nice hat and fits me perfectly which is one of the advantages of being married to a knitter. She’s also knitted me several pairs of socks and before this she knitted me a hat with police boxes and Daleks on it, and before that she knitted me a fish hat so one of these things is not like the other two, but that’s okay because my interests range from the sea to the stars. When she knitted me the fish hat some of her friends asked, “Will he wear it?” which just goes to show that they don’t know me whereas she does, although I think even she was kind of surprised by how often I wore the fish hat and sometimes she’d say, “Okay, I’m glad you like it, but you can take it off now. It’s August.” But that’s another story.

As I was walking along in my octopus hat it occurred to me I was at a real disadvantage if I wanted to commit a crime. I wasn’t thinking of any specific nefarious acts, or even any non-specific ones, so I’m not sure how the idea popped into my head, but you know how these things go. An idea pops up and then it links up to a couple of other ideas and then they get moving and pick up some extras and my octopus hat might as well be a conductor’s cap because we’ve got a full load of freight and we’ll be hauling all night until we’ve pulled into the yards just on the edge of Poughkeepsie.

You see how these things go. The point is if I committed a crime and there were any witnesses their interview with the police would go like this:

“What did he look like?”

“Well, average height, average build, pretty much average all around.”

“Anything distinguishing?”

“He had an octopus hat.”

“That’s all we need!”

And that got me thinking how when I was a kid and riding in the backseat of my mother’s car and a guy on a motorcycle pulled up next to us. He had a big bushy beard and wore a leather vest and had tattoos on his arms. My friend Troy who was riding along with us said, “He looks like a bad guy.”

My mother said, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” which confused me because we weren’t talking about books and also how are you supposed to judge a book? Even if you’re not judging it by its cover you’re at least making a decision about whether or not you want to read it based on the title. It sounds nice in principle to withhold judgment about a book until you’ve finished it and I even once tried to live according to that but gave up when I realized I didn’t even have an Atari so reading the entire repair manual didn’t help me at all; besides I figured out by page two that the capacitor did it so that was not the big twist ending I think it was supposed to be.

Anyway I had this strange intuition that maybe this guy, even though he looked kind of scary, might not be a bad guy, or if he was he’d be a really dumb criminal because in those days he had enough distinguishing features that he’d be easy for the cops to find. Now of course the exact opposite is true.

“What did he look like?”

“He had a big, bushy beard, a leather vest, and tattoos up and down both arms.”

“So pretty much average all around.”

Since this train of thought is now running out of steam, or maybe coal which they use to fuel the fire, or maybe water which is what the fire turns into steam, or maybe we’re just pulling into the station, the big twist ending is that if I’m going to turn to a life of crime it’ll have to wait until at least August.

Bonus: The Fish Hat

The traditional Christmas tree is an evergreen because evergreens keep their foliage year round, hence the name, so they’re symbolic of life surviving through the winter, of renewal and hope at the very darkest and coldest point of the year.At least that’s the conventional wisdom, but at a certain point when I was a kid I started wondering if this was really the case. If it’s all about life and renewal why does the tree have to die? And let me add this was long before hip people started bringing live trees into their homes, decorating them, and then planting them outside once Christmas was over, pretty much guaranteeing that the tree, used to being in a nice warm house, watered regularly, and treated with great kindness, would die of shock.

The idea that a traditional real Christmas tree is not really a symbol of life but the sacrificial murder of a living thing in order to appease the cruel winter spirits didn’t come to me easily. After all we always had a plastic tree that spent most of the year in the attic. One of our holiday rituals was unpacking it from its box and putting it together. The metal ends of the branches that were inserted in the trunk were color-coded and had corresponding marks on the trunk itself for the benefit of anyone who’d never actually seen a tree and wouldn’t know that the biggest branches would go at the bottom and gradually get smaller as they went up. If we’d ever had a yule log I might have gotten the idea that there was some kind of ritualistic sacrifice going on since it was a tradition that went back to pagan times, even if it was the burning of a dead hunk of wood rather than an animal or a person. But we didn’t even have a fireplace until I was fifteen when my parents turned half the basement into a rec room and had one installed so they could have cozy fires in the bottom level of the house that would trick the thermostat into thinking it was July so my room, at the very top level of the house, would be freezing. And since we didn’t have a fireplace I just figured Santa, like everyone else, came in through the front door and, like the mailman, just parked his sleigh on the street rather than bothering with landing on everyone’s roof.

Also I’ve never known anyone who had a yule log. It was one of those things I heard people talk about but never actually saw and for years I didn’t even realize it was an actual log and thought it had something to do with the fact that during the holiday season at least one TV channel would show The King And I, probably for the benefit of adults who were sick to death of singing and dancing animated characters and would rather see some real people singing and dancing, but that’s another story.

What put the idea in my head that the cutting and eventual destruction of a Christmas tree is more symbolic of death than life was my decision to cut down my own Christmas tree and use it to decorate my room. I was nine, by the way. I wasn’t trying to separate myself from the family or anything like that. I just thought it would be fun to go through the whole ritual of going into the woods, cutting down a tree, and bringing it home. Except in my case I’d be going to the rocky vacant lot near my house. Not exactly Robert Frost territory but I worked with what I had. I didn’t have a hatchet either but I found a rusty old saw in the basement that I figured would take down any of the stunted cedar trees that grew among the rocks. I picked one that was a little taller than I was and went to work on its trunk. First though I cleaned off the bagworms. If you’ve never heard of them bagworms are caterpillars that make cocoons out of evergreen needles and silk and hang from the branches and it only now occurs to me that they’d make interesting decorations if spray painted different colors and given a coat of glitter and when they eventually turn into moths that’s a special bonus.

Anyway half an hour and half an inch into the trunk I realized there was no way I was going to bring the tree down before June so I moved onto a slightly smaller one. And then a third one. I went through several more before I finally got one that was small enough that I could yank it out by the roots. Stuck in a can with its base wrapped in a blanket in my room it looked more like a decoration for a doll’s house than the majestic towering tree I’d hoped for. And as I carried my bounty home I felt guilty, thinking I’d needlessly killed half a dozen or so trees in my quest. That at least I didn’t need to worry about. Those trees grew in a pile of limestone between two busy roads. They could survive anything. Even the holidays.

When I was a kid decorating your house—the outside, anyway—for the holidays meant throwing a few strings of lights around the eaves and maybe on a tree or the bushes. Some people would put up a statue of Santa or a snowman but I think that was considered gauche. And then one year the neighbor of some friends of my parents decided to go all out. He covered the front of his house with lights, filled the yard with a dozen Santas and at least three nativity scenes plus giant illuminated candy canes, stockings, a workshop complete with elves, and three more Santas in sleds with reindeer on the roof. People would drive by just to stare in wonder at this wonderland, and it wasn’t hard to find: just look for the beam, like a stationary searchlight, pointed straight up. And also straight into the windows of the people across the street. This was before this kind of Christmas excess became a regular thing, before it was the subject of TV shows, although the guy did get featured on the local news which just added to the neighborhood traffic. You had to avoid looking directly at the house or it would be burned into your retina and you’d still see it for months, which is why the place brought down property values through March. There’s a fine line between kitschy and tasteless and this guy was the John Waters of Christmas decorations. And I thought, wow, there’s a guy who really loves Christmas. Or really hates his neighbors. Maybe both. At the time most families—including mine—didn’t decorate the outsides of our houses. It’s not that we lacked the holiday spirit. My mother had approximately three tons of Christmas decorations, including a green ceramic Christmas tree that lit up, rotated, and played “Jingle Bells” and which she placed on top of the TV where it provided the perfect background music to Quincy. All these decorations, though, were for the inside of the house and I had a serious longing to join the cool people who decorated the outsides of their houses. I didn’t want to create a neighborhood eyesore. I just wanted something subtle: a few strings of lights, maybe around the eaves, some covering the low-growing holly bushes in front of the porch to make them less menacing, a string around each of the windows, and a dozen or so around the trees at either end of the house.

I wanted to keep it subtle.

My parents did eventually capitulate to my pleas for bubble lights for our Christmas tree so I not only got the joy of bubble lights but also the added fun of wondering why that one weird holdout wouldn’t bubble, why, when all the others were happily bubbling away it remained still. For so long I’d wanted bubble lights and yet when we got them it was the one that wouldn’t bubble that drew my attention, that, late at night when we turned off all the lights except the ones on the Christmas tree, would speak to me. “Hey kid,” it said, “do your own thing. Be an individual, follow your own drummer, dance to your own tune, and when you bury a body in a shallow grave be sure to use quicklime.” But that’s another story.

In retrospect I’m not sure why it mattered so much to me that our house join the ranks of decorated ones. It didn’t occur to me that the only time I really thought about it was December, and that the strings of lights would spend most of the year boxed up in the attic slowly tying themselves into knots. I think I just liked the way they looked. In the cold winter, when the days shortened and the nights were long and quiet, when the trees were bare and the grass brittle and pale, there were lights. They shone through the darkness in many colors, reflections of all the hopes and dreams of all the people who lived in those houses.

Then one year we did get some outdoor lights—just a few, and my father strung them around one of the trees in the front yard. And that’s when I learned the downside of outdoor lights: you can’t see them if you’re inside the house, listening to “Jingle Bells” and watching Quincy.

We were sitting in the school lunchroom and a friend and I were having an argument. It wasn’t a serious argument because I don’t do serious arguments. It was more of a friendly debate about something arcane and he made a really superb point and I, stumped, just said, “Oh, fork you.” And we all laughed and went on with our conversation.

And then gradually I became aware of a voice behind me.

“Son, I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of language from you.”

It was Mr. Blankley, my algebra teacher, or, as I preferred to think of him, Human Valium. Mr. Blankley was in a perpetual state of slow motion: he moved slowly, he talked slowly. Algebra was my first class of the day and it was more than I could take as soon as he started talking.

“Studentsss, today we will have a quizzzzz on chapterssss ssssixxxxx and ssssseven.”

The one saving grace is he would use up twenty minutes of class time saying that that but I still couldn’t keep my eyes open, much less focus on getting any work done.

Mr. Blankley was also so clueless he had no idea I was one of his students, although I’d be transferred out shortly afterward because half the kids in his class were below average, half the kids were failing, and half couldn’t even grasp simple fractions, but that’s another story.

“I said ‘fork’” I said, holding one up for him.

He sighed for five minutes then said, “Ssson, I said I don’t want to hear any more of that language.”

Fortunately at that moment the end of lunch bell rang and my friends and I quietly gathered up our things and left, a series of actions which, from Mr. Blankley’s perspective, must have looked like hummingbirds around a feeder.

I’m sharing this story now because tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States—the Canadians do it six weeks earlier—and for many it’s a stressful time. For many it means getting together with family and that can lead to arguments ranging from the pointlessly political to the annoyingly personal. If things get too stressful for you just remember that Thanksgiving is a feast and if you feel like things are getting overheated in the kitchen or out, if somebody says something or insists on doing that one thing that gets under your skin…fork ‘em.

The winter holidays always meant a few days off from school, and that usually meant my friends and I had a lot of unstructured, unsupervised time, and that usually led to trouble, like the time I told my friend Jerry about sex.

Let me back up a bit.
Learning about sex was like learning there was no Santa Claus, but weirder and more uncomfortable. Supposedly my friend John, whose mother was a gynecological nurse, had explained the facts of life to my first grade class but all I remember was that he told us babies came out of women’s bodies. He didn’t go into specifics about how the babies got there. So I thought pregnancy happened randomly. At a certain point in each woman’s life, I thought, she’d just spontaneously get pregnant. For some it happened multiple times. I held onto this belief through a lot of my childhood. Based on others’ experiences it seems extremely bizarre that at ten years old I still didn’t know that it took two to make a baby.

I knew adults did naked stuff together, primarily from my next door neighbor Mr. Rick who was gone a lot and had boxes and boxes of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in his basement. I mean tons of them. This was the seventies and neither magazine had been around that long, but it seemed like his collection just went on forever. He kept his basement open all the time so his dogs could go in and out. My friend Troy loved going in there and looking at the magazines. I kind of liked it too, but didn’t entirely understand what the big deal was. They were mostly women and mostly naked, which seemed strangely fun, but I didn’t think of it as something that everybody did or that might have some purpose other than just being something to do.

At this time I believed we men were unnecessary. I didn’t think women would undertake wholesale slaughter of roughly half the population, but I also thought that men should treat women with respect and give them equal rights and pay. I was the only boy in my fourth grade class who supported the Equal Rights Amendment. I didn’t do this because I wanted to curry favor with the girls. The whole idea that girls and or boys had cooties and purposely stayed away from each other never seemed to be the case when I was in school. Most of my friends were fellow boys, but I had no problem hanging out with the girls as long as they weren’t playing with Barbies or doing something stupid like that.

To clarify: I no longer thing playing with Barbies is stupid. In fact it was a notion I got over pretty quickly. I was never big on playing with army men either, which are basically just tiny dolls with guns. I realized this when Star Wars came out. I became an insane collector of the action figures and I spent hours playing with them. And one day I heard my mother describe them as “dolls for boys”. Okay, I thought. I play with dolls. They just happen to be special science fiction dolls.

Eventually I’d figure out the basics of reproduction, mainly from what I read about animals. As a kid I had dreams of growing up to be a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau, so I was always reading about ocean animals, especially octopuses. There was a book about octopuses I checked out from the public library so many times I had it memorized. It included an explanation of octopus sex. I took this information in stride, and even once explained octopus sex to my grandfather. The male develops a modified tentacle as it ages, I told him, and shoves it inside the female. He was silently impressed.

I knew that among octopuses, frogs, lizards, crabs, snakes, and all sorts of other animals that interested me the females would have eggs and the males would fertilize them. It just took me a long time to extrapolate that humans, being animals, must be the same way, that human males do have, to quote Navin Johnson, a “special purpose”. It took me a while because it’s not like nature is consistent. Hermaphroditism is rampant in the animal kingdom, and anyone who’s seen Jurassic Park knows certain reptiles and amphibians can self-fertilize or even change sex under duress. And humans don’t have sex solely for the purpose of reproduction. Neither do some other animals. It was confusing because it was complicated, and made even more complicated by how uncomfortable it makes some adults even when they try to talk to each other about it, never mind trying to explain it to children, and it doesn’t help that a lot of adults find it so uncomfortable that if human beings reproduced by spontaneous parthenogenesis it seems really unlikely we’d have ever developed stand-up comedy or even jokes, but that’s another story.

What finally settled it in my mind was an after-school cartoon I happened to stumble upon about the changes boys’ and girls’ bodies go through when they hit puberty. It showed an egg rolling down the fallopian tube and explained that the egg would dissolve unless it was fertilized by a male. I had no idea how the fertilization took place exactly, but from bits and pieces I’d picked up from other places I realized it would be sort of like how the octopus did it, except that human males are born with a modified tentacle between our legs.

I don’t know why but at eleven or twelve when I first realized all this I felt like it was something I shouldn’t know. I felt like I’d stumbled upon something that was supposed to be kept locked in a box until I was eighteen, or at least until my parents had The Talk with me. I knew about Talk from Very Special Sitcom Episodes that conveniently avoided including the actual talk but made it clear from the context what it was about. And I felt like I would be in serious trouble if my parents ever found out.

So naturally I talked about it. I did manage to keep my parents from knowing what I knew for three or four years, but then one day when we were out of school I talked to my friend Jerry about it. Jerry was a year younger but knew pretty much everything I knew about sex. He’d been in Mr. Rick’s basement too. He’d even torn pages from some of the magazines and kept a pretty big stash hidden in his room. But for some reason when his sister, who was two or three years older, heard me talking to Jerry about sex she was horrified. He was too young to know about that stuff! And she told my mom.

Deep down I like to think my parents were relieved they didn’t have to have The Talk with me in its entirety, that I knew enough that there wasn’t much left for them to fill in. The only bad part was my mother asking me what exactly I’d said to Jerry—his sister was sketchy on the details—and then telling me we’d have The Talk later on. Please, please, please I thought, let her forget about this. Let’s skip The Talk. Having been caught talking about it was punishment enough, I thought, without having to talk about it with my parents. And my mother did seem to forget about it for about a week until one night when I was about to go to bed and she started talking about it. I think it was a spur of the moment thing on her part. And fortunately my mother’s version of The Talk was very sparing on details. The most memorable part was her saying, “Your father and I aren’t embarrassed when we see each other naked because we love each other.” I could almost hear muscles popping in my father’s head as he strained to keep his eyes from rolling. I wish he’d just given in. It would have given both of us permission to acknowledge that I was fourteen, not four.

Fortunately that was the end of it, at least as far as my parents were concerned. I never wanted to talk to them about sex and, beyond that greatly modified version of The Talk, never would. And I wouldn’t become a marine biologist. I also didn’t really understand sex until I’d done it, so there at least I learned something every scientist knows: theoretical knowledge is worthless without fieldwork.

The average cold lasts five days. That’s according to something I read somewhere so it must be true even though whenever I have a cold it feels like it goes on for five years. Even from an objective viewpoint that seems ridiculously short and it also occurred to me that’s probably the average time with cold medicine. I have a theory about cold medicine. I don’t think it makes you well and in most cases it doesn’t. It just treats the symptoms which is the problem. I think cold medicine drags out the cold making it last longer than it would if you just did the natural thing and curled up in bed for five days. People seem to have a problem with that, mainly, I think, because the second or third day you’re going to run out of fresh sheets to blow your nose on. But like I said cold medicines treat the symptoms: the runny nose, the coughing, the aching head and body. These symptoms are not directly caused by the disease itself. They’re caused by the body’s response to the disease. Our bodies are smart enough to know when unruly neighbors have moved in and need to be evicted. Let’s put it even more forcefully: our bodies know when an enemy has slipped in and it becomes necessary to go into attack mode. All that excess phlegm is the body’s way of clearing out the intruders. Coughing and sneezing are the body’s way of expelling what doesn’t belong and those wads of mucus are the graveyards of germs and the brave antibodies and the white blood cells that bravely fought in our defense. That’s why it’s so important to keep drinking and taking vitamin C when you have a cold. You’ve got to keep your precious bodily fluids topped up so the expulsion and continue and vitamin C does, well, it does something. That’s why whenever I get a cold I take about two billion milligrams of vitamin C a day. I don’t just pop vitamin pills like they’re candy. I take it like they’re candy and it’s the day after Halloween only I don’t need my parents to check any of my stash because my throat already feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades, but that’s another story. Every cold is a battle and hot tea and orange juice are the only things standing between you and your lungs turning into the Somme. Whenever I come through a cold I like to think there’s a tiny monument placed somewhere along a major artery: “This plaque commemorates the brave leuokocytes who gave their nuclei against the viral threat. Lest we forget.”

And that’s the problem I have with cold medicines. They stop the coughing, they dry up the runny nose, they even remove the aches. I feel like cold medicines aim for the wrong target—and even then they miss. Cold medicines don’t just put me to sleep. They put me into a coma and I wake up the next morning feeling even worse than before. I get those dry, hacking coughs that sound like a goose being goosed. At least with a wet, phlegmy cough I feel like things are moving, being cleared out. And that’s true of blowing my nose too. At least when my nose is running all it takes is a good blow to clear out the junk. There’s a feeling of intense relief that comes when I blow out a two or three pound mass, the kind that leaves me feeling like I’ve blown my brains out but in a good way because now my head is empty, for about ten seconds anyway and then the sinuses start to seize up again. Cold medicines deprive us of that. They make us just carry around the cold that much longer. Those cold medicines that are designed to get you through the day are really the worst because they encourage you to take your disease-addled body out into the world. Hey co-workers, the holidays come early this year and I’m giving you all influenza! At least the night-time cold medicines provide some relief and in that respite it’s possible to sleep. And if there’s one thing the body needs while your antibodies are charging across Pleural Fields it’s rest. Rest provides strength and speeds recovery. Without it you might get one of those colds that lasts five years.