The economic news hasn’t been so good lately. It seems the American consumer is finally not responding to the urgent cries to spend, spend, spend. Chuck used to say that it’s impossible to spend oneself rich. He was referring specifically to me when I’d come home with my “bargains” from the sales. But he was right. Only the government benefits when we spend. They get the taxes, we get the bill. Yet only by spending do we keep the multiple and overlapping businesses that support our supposed need for “choice.”
I was reminded of this the other day when I went to the supermarket to buy ice cream. I found myself confronted by a freezer case of choice that stretched from the front of the store to the rear. It’s not a small store, so you get the idea.
Walking down the freezer cases was like watching a procession of precedence. First came the big boys. The Ben and Jerry’s and the company with the nonsensical name of Haagen Daas. These gourmet ice creams justify their cost by butter fat, fancy names for the flavors, and a hovering air of exclusivity. They are competing not only with each other but with the 38 flavors of Baskin Robbins.
Then came the middle brands, things like Meadowgold and Breyers. Their marketing strategy is basically the same. They have the same basic flavors (bland) and try to differentiate themselves in one of the two ways. They either try to underprice one another or second guess America’s current dietary preoccupations be they for light, fat-free, or even for sorbet or frozen yogurt. In the case of the latter, it's to the point that I can't predict whether something will be there the next time I go in. Sid says that one way to know if something's working is that the next time you look for it, it's been changed. It's also the mark of something that's not working. Innovation rules.
The result of all this "choice" and innovation is a conglomeration of brands with little to choose between them except for the huge difference between the full cream brands and the ones that imply we can enjoy the product without paying for it in calories. This is a case where the idea of choice has gone mad--at least I think so.
I know I could be writing about almost any other product and I know that the principle of competition is supposed to hold prices down. But how many brands of anything do we need? Especially when some of those brands are made in some central place out of state and come laden with preservatives so they don't harden, dry out, thicken, or go stale before they reach our supermarket shelves? Someone once told me that they use the same preservatives for food as they do to embalm bodies. To be very British, that proper put the wind up me.
I suppose that I’m remembering Forte’s Café on the Hove Seafront. We had the choice of vanilla, vanilla with fruit, and strawberry. The ice cream was great. I’m not at all sure that having ice cream in the flavors of mango fruitie-tootie, latte frappaccino, and walnut parfait, has made my life richer. The older I get, in fact, the less I am entraced with choice.
I imagine that all these ice cream producers may become victims of America’s slow down in spending. Ice cream is, after all, somewhat expendable. If that’s the case, I look forward to not going in to the supermarket and feeling like a predator looking at a school of fish when I go down the ice cream section.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Every Purpose Under Heaven
As most of you already know, I’m doing the final edit for my second novel, Every Purpose Under Heaven. It deals with a dying man who is afraid to move on. Now it is done, I can say it’s been a long personal journey for me. It’s made me confront myself and what I do or don’t believe about life and death.
The dying man, whom I call Bill del Vecchio, is based in part on what happened when my husband, Chuck, died. We were giving Chuck morphine on an as-needed basis so he was in and out of consciousness. When he was out, he seemed to be talking to people we could not see. We asked him about it once when he woke. He told us that he was in the Civil War trying to get supplies out to troops dug in along a road. He remembered moving his arms protectively because he was running from tree to tree to dodge bullets. He described the scene so vividly it made me think of the battlefield at Manassas. When he went back to sleep, his arm movements started again, so we assumed he had gone back to that dangerous place.
I was reminded about Chuck’s experience by the media reports surrounding Pope John Paul’s death in 2005. The officials around him reported that the pontiff said, “You have come for me. I thank you,” shortly before he died. No explanation was offered about whom he was talking to. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he was talking to the saints and his predecessors, the people he would have expected and wanted to see. Since he was in a coma, as I understand it, he was never asked.
If I was right, and the dying pontiff saw whom he wished to, I have to ask myself why Chuck wanted to be on a Civil War battlefield during the height of a battle. Why ever would he have wanted or expected to go to such a place? Not having any answer made me curious about what happens at the time of death.
I had no time to answer my own questions at first. After his death. I went out on another quest to find my father. He had been killed in a Halifax bomber during 1944. It took me time and travel to three continents to find his family and the survivor of his crew. The result was my first book, Extraordinary Things, based loosely on my own experience and heavily on that of the WWII aircrew veterans I met along the way. Once that book was done. I turned back to trying to understand what might have happened to Chuck.
Since the closest we ever get to the experience of death comes from those people with near-death experiences, most of the literature and research deals with them. Their reports are fairly consistent. They report a tunnel and light and seeing dead loved ones. That was a comforting thought, but it still didn’t explain what Chuck saw. Then I started reading books about things like soul purpose and incarnations. Most of them argued that we are all part of a spiritual universe that seeks perfection. Well, no one I knew was likely to be perfect anytime soon, but I began to see what the books were getting at. I asked some further questions. What if Chuck were being shown something to help him learn what he was meant to? If so, it couldn’t just be him. What if all of us go through this process to learn something from having lived our lives? I found that idea intriguing. But do we all have to go through this? Some of us may be self-aware enough to see our lives as leading to some purpose. On the other hand, what if someone were not self-aware, or even more, was deliberately un-self-aware. What then? I began to see the kernel of an idea for a story. What if a modern man started "remembering" something from the past? Could what he discovers say something about life and death that would be hopeful and ultimately even joyful.
Immediately, I ran into a problem. I needed to find a historical time similar to ours yet separated enough to provide a perspective on ours. After some false starts, I settled on the Italian Renaisssance, a time when fundamentalism clashed with reason. I thought of a scholar named Aonio Paleario. No one much has heard of him now, but in his time he was as famous as Erasmus or Bruno. He was brilliant, scholarly, stubborn, and arrogant, and very modern in his independence and demand for freedom. He deliberately martyred himself to oppose the Catholic Church and when they predictably executed him, he left behind a trail of broken family members who were punished along with him. If such a man were to “come back” in modern times, would he have learned something? Would he try to do things differently? What if some of the same people “came back” with him--would he try to make amends to them? Or they to him? That’s what Every Purpose Under Heaven tries to explore.
I have to admit I’m attracted to the ideas of symmetry and accountability, so I like the idea that our untidy lives are not the end. I particularly like the idea of purpose and that maybe surviving and amassing material goods is not the ultimate reason for existence. That leaves open, of course, what the purpose is. Some years ago, I remember reading reports about a Neolithic cave burial. The skeleton was of a deformed man who had grown into adulthood. The remains of shriveled flower garlands were found, suggesting that he had been mourned. That was an epiphany for me. With all the bad press our supposedly “brutish” ancestors had been given through our media, here was evidence that they cared for one another, had compassion, and regardless of what the anthropologists care to tell us, were human beings. Surely our purpose all these thousands of years later cannot be much different—to love and have compassion for those around us—those, if you choose to believe—who have agreed to come back with us and link their lives with ours.
I do not know if any of this is true. But, after writing the book, I hope so.
The dying man, whom I call Bill del Vecchio, is based in part on what happened when my husband, Chuck, died. We were giving Chuck morphine on an as-needed basis so he was in and out of consciousness. When he was out, he seemed to be talking to people we could not see. We asked him about it once when he woke. He told us that he was in the Civil War trying to get supplies out to troops dug in along a road. He remembered moving his arms protectively because he was running from tree to tree to dodge bullets. He described the scene so vividly it made me think of the battlefield at Manassas. When he went back to sleep, his arm movements started again, so we assumed he had gone back to that dangerous place.
I was reminded about Chuck’s experience by the media reports surrounding Pope John Paul’s death in 2005. The officials around him reported that the pontiff said, “You have come for me. I thank you,” shortly before he died. No explanation was offered about whom he was talking to. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he was talking to the saints and his predecessors, the people he would have expected and wanted to see. Since he was in a coma, as I understand it, he was never asked.
If I was right, and the dying pontiff saw whom he wished to, I have to ask myself why Chuck wanted to be on a Civil War battlefield during the height of a battle. Why ever would he have wanted or expected to go to such a place? Not having any answer made me curious about what happens at the time of death.
I had no time to answer my own questions at first. After his death. I went out on another quest to find my father. He had been killed in a Halifax bomber during 1944. It took me time and travel to three continents to find his family and the survivor of his crew. The result was my first book, Extraordinary Things, based loosely on my own experience and heavily on that of the WWII aircrew veterans I met along the way. Once that book was done. I turned back to trying to understand what might have happened to Chuck.
Since the closest we ever get to the experience of death comes from those people with near-death experiences, most of the literature and research deals with them. Their reports are fairly consistent. They report a tunnel and light and seeing dead loved ones. That was a comforting thought, but it still didn’t explain what Chuck saw. Then I started reading books about things like soul purpose and incarnations. Most of them argued that we are all part of a spiritual universe that seeks perfection. Well, no one I knew was likely to be perfect anytime soon, but I began to see what the books were getting at. I asked some further questions. What if Chuck were being shown something to help him learn what he was meant to? If so, it couldn’t just be him. What if all of us go through this process to learn something from having lived our lives? I found that idea intriguing. But do we all have to go through this? Some of us may be self-aware enough to see our lives as leading to some purpose. On the other hand, what if someone were not self-aware, or even more, was deliberately un-self-aware. What then? I began to see the kernel of an idea for a story. What if a modern man started "remembering" something from the past? Could what he discovers say something about life and death that would be hopeful and ultimately even joyful.
Immediately, I ran into a problem. I needed to find a historical time similar to ours yet separated enough to provide a perspective on ours. After some false starts, I settled on the Italian Renaisssance, a time when fundamentalism clashed with reason. I thought of a scholar named Aonio Paleario. No one much has heard of him now, but in his time he was as famous as Erasmus or Bruno. He was brilliant, scholarly, stubborn, and arrogant, and very modern in his independence and demand for freedom. He deliberately martyred himself to oppose the Catholic Church and when they predictably executed him, he left behind a trail of broken family members who were punished along with him. If such a man were to “come back” in modern times, would he have learned something? Would he try to do things differently? What if some of the same people “came back” with him--would he try to make amends to them? Or they to him? That’s what Every Purpose Under Heaven tries to explore.
I have to admit I’m attracted to the ideas of symmetry and accountability, so I like the idea that our untidy lives are not the end. I particularly like the idea of purpose and that maybe surviving and amassing material goods is not the ultimate reason for existence. That leaves open, of course, what the purpose is. Some years ago, I remember reading reports about a Neolithic cave burial. The skeleton was of a deformed man who had grown into adulthood. The remains of shriveled flower garlands were found, suggesting that he had been mourned. That was an epiphany for me. With all the bad press our supposedly “brutish” ancestors had been given through our media, here was evidence that they cared for one another, had compassion, and regardless of what the anthropologists care to tell us, were human beings. Surely our purpose all these thousands of years later cannot be much different—to love and have compassion for those around us—those, if you choose to believe—who have agreed to come back with us and link their lives with ours.
I do not know if any of this is true. But, after writing the book, I hope so.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Guest blog: Vertical and horizontal revisited
Here's another take on the difference between the male and female perspective--this time from the younger set. Deb can be found at dweeb@stetser.net
I'd be hard pressed to find anyone over the age of 40 who doesn't know who Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison are. The Odd Couple was a 60's Broadway play about two divorced men living as roommates, complete opposites in most ways, most notably their lifestyles. Tony Randall and Jack Klugman did a superb job of bringing life to these two characters in the 70s sitcom of the same name. I was going to entitle this "Men Are From Mars" but I think Felix and Oscar can do more justice to the story.
This morning while getting ready to show our condo to another potential buyer, I reached under the sink to pull out the "good" towels. We aren't allowed to use them; they serve ONE purpose only, to make our bathrooms look like everything in them actually coordinates. As I extricated the towels from the crowded cabinet, I knocked over my husband Dan's bottle of Listerine. The cap had not been screwed on and the contents gushed onto the carpet, soaking right in. I let out a string of expletives, sighed and grabbed a towel to blot up the mess. No time to pull out the carpet cleaner to suck up the liquid, so I tossed a small hand towel which could also pass as a throw rug over the spot and hoped no one would step on it.
As I finished tidying up, one of my favorites shows, The Odd Couple came to mind and I realized how very similar Dan and I are to those two guys. I recalled our 13 years together and my struggle to reach some sort of a compromise on upkeeping our home. Once long ago when I proclaimed Dan a huge slob, he accused me of being compulsive about germs because I worked in an operating room. Admittedly, he's come a long way from the days when I caught him dropping food on the kitchen floor and leaving it and the time I saw him toss a handful of potato peels over his shoulder (without looking), aiming in the general direction of the trash can behind him. NOW I understood why the side of the refrigerator was always dotted with specks of food - Dan used it to bank scraps into the trash.
Listerine aside, his transgressions are now less severe. Either that, or I'm so immune to 'em I barely notice. I still find his habit of leaving the kitchen cupboards open annoying, or the way he leaves lights on after he's left the room, but he has stepped up in helping maintain the illusion that our home always looks like it does when we have a showing. Just this morning, he cleaned the majority of the mess up before he left for work and there wasn't much left for me to do...except deal with the catbox. And mouthwash.
My girlfriend Annette and I lament over the way WE view "clean and neat" and our husbands do. We've both noticed the maddening habit of Scott and Dan's kitchen clean up routines. Wash all the dishes and leave grease on the stove, food and crumbs on the counter then act bewildered when we point out the kitchen is not clean.Annette recounted a funny exchange she had with Scott over chores. She complained "you don't do anything". He countered "I do things" and she countered with "Well, you don't do ENOUGH!"
Are Dan, Scott, Annette and I typical in our experiences? Are men just a different breed? I remember my grandfather being in charge of the housework. Every weekend he would vacuum, dust, polish and clean while my grandmother did whatever it was she did. He also was responsible for cooking most of their meals. My Dad liked to cook also, but that happened after he retired. He never was interested in housecleaning, but he was pretty neat in his own right.Dan's brother (a former slob) has some issues with neatness and the like. I was horrified when we visited his new home one day to find he had bought his wife a carpet rake, which she gleefully demonstrated while proclaiming how much she loved raking the carpet. ??? !!! Yikes, can you say Stepford Wife?
If I could, would I change Dan into a neatnik? Would I want him buying me gifts like a rug rake? HELL NO! One might find it hard to believe there is an up side to living with someone who has more on his agenda than a spotless house. If I don't feel like cleaning, straightening or otherwise attending to the house, it's not a big deal to Dan. He's never once complained about my messes (and believe me, I can make messes with the best of 'em). If I don't want to clean, wash dishes, or do laundry, Dan couldn't care less.There's something to be said for living with Oscar. You'll have to ask Dan what it's like to have Felix for a roommate.
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