ABCDEnough

July 28, 2019

When it rains, it pours. And hails.

The Monday before a trip planned to begin the following Sunday, I took my car in for its state inspection. On the drive there, the check engine light came on, showing transmission fluid overheating. They could reset it, they said, but the inspection requires data so they couldn’t perform it until I’d driven fifty miles.

During the fifty miles, the check engine light came on again. It went off after the car had sat in the garage overnight and didn’t come on when I started it again. I called but the next service appointment wasn’t until the following week, when we planned to be in another state and our inspection would be expired. They suggested I leave it all day Friday, which I did. They inspected it and passed it, and fixed some wiring leading to the transmission temperature sensor. They didn’t charge for the wiring.

Good thing, since the light came on again on my drive home. I called and was assured it was safe to drive on a trip and they’d try again on my return.

Sunday, the house was awfully warm. The house’s air conditioning wasn’t cooling. This prompted us to leave early, breaking the very long day’s drive into a half a day Sunday afternoon and a regular day Monday.

As we backed out of the driveway, we saw that bees were swarming their favorite spot, which had required an exterminator the year before. No time for that now.

We were nearly an hour away from home, the check engine light on, when the warning chime for a dangerous condition sounded and the panel showed us with no data from the sensor. Then a dial showed, the temperature at the middle. Jump to the maximum. Disappear, no data. Middle again. Maximum. The whole time the chime was sounding about every 60 seconds. We could not make a trip like this.

So we drove home—the house was really warm now—and put our luggage into the other car, which is fifteen years old and needs a muffler. We backed out a second time, noting there were at least ten bees gnawing their way under our siding. The person who’d be picking up our mail wasn’t going to like that.

Nearly two and a half hours after we’d initially left, we were on the road again. We wouldn’t reach our hotel before dinner, so where should we stop? We discussed revisiting a restaurant we’d enjoyed well enough for lunches in past trips.

When we arrived, it had gone out of business. There were two other restaurants near the exit. One had an hour wait, the other a half hour. We didn’t want to lose that much time.

We drove past the major city and its immediate suburbs and saw a chain restaurant that didn’t have a full parking lot. Good enough—barely.

Over dinner, we checked our email and had a message left at 7:46 pm. on our landline back home from Home Depot in Watertown, Massachusetts. We don’t live there, but our daughter isn’t far. I texted her; she’d been waiting all day for them to email and text her at her own number that her order was ready for pick up. No, she hadn’t given the landline number at a place she hasn’t lived for a dozen years. Her last name isn’t the same as ours since her marriage. How they’d gotten that number and why they ignored the one she gave remains a mystery—but there was no mystery that the store was closed for the day.

Our hotel check-in went smoothly enough, but there was a wait for the elevator, because one wasn’t working. I’m in the hotel now, mulling over our day.

A, the air conditioning broke

B, the bees are swarming our front door

C, the car was undriveable despite being in for service twice that week

D, our dinner choice was impossible, and so were back-ups in the vicinity

E, the elevator was out

F, Home Depot fucked up on who and how to notify an order was ready

I can’t wait for G.

Friends Whose Names I Don't Know

For decades, I’ve shopped at a particular Wegmans within a two-hour range on a weekday morning. As you’d expect, you see other people whose habits are similar to your own. Maybe you say Good morning or I don’t think much of these green bananas after a year or two. Eventually you talk briefly about the store and it contents, the city you’re in, the weather, a tragedy in the news. You aren’t friends, but you connect with these people.

They remark when they don’t see you for a few weeks, and you tell them of taking your oldest off to college, the funeral you attended, the vacation you enjoyed. Once or twice a week for years, you exchange pleasantries, without even knowing their names.

I have more than one Wegmans-friend, but the one I saw today is special. At one time, he was always with the same woman, clearly her assistant of whom she was fond and vice versa. Over time I learned she’d lost her husband to MRSA in what should have been a routine surgery, and getting out of the house regardless of the weather, shopping every day for food, did her good. Over a period of years, her own health failed and he shopped for her, and we continued to chat over nothing much. Later he appeared to be shopping for himself and I presumed she no longer employed him. I could only guess the reasons, none of them pleasant.

“Haven’t seen you in a month!” he’d say. “You been good?”

I’d tell him of a weekend in Boston, our younger daughter’s search for work, the traffic that made me appreciate where I live.

Today he didn’t look so good. We waved from across the store, and for no particular reason, I stopped, waiting for him to catch up. “How have you been?” He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, and looked tired.

“Not so good,” he said. “My daughter passed, on Mother’s Day.”

“That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

To my surprise, the tears of sympathy were immediate. I’m not a person who cries easily or often. But it was too easy to imagine the loss of either of my own girls. 

I didn’t hesitate. This was my friend, whether I knew his name or didn’t. I hugged him and cried for his pain, right in the produce section. We talked a while, me crying the whole time, and I learned that this was his second daughter to die in a two year period, the happy one who was always able to draw a smile out of him when he picked her up from work no matter how grim his thoughts. He had another daughter who’d suffered a massive stroke and could not speak. She appeared to recognize family members, but maybe that was just what he wanted to see. He was taking this fresh loss hard, hadn’t been able to really cry about it.

There is no right way to grieve, I reminded him, no clock on when he had to cry. I muttered some platitude I don’t even believe and hugged him a second time.

People stared when a plump white woman hugged a somewhat rough looking black man, and others stared when that woman cried or sniffled through the soup aisle and bulk food.

This was a real connection, a human who cared about another human’s pain and loss. I don’t know his education, political beliefs, who he hates or fears, any of that. I just know he was hurting, and that I truly cared.

Where Jason Momoa Goes Wrong

A certain segment of the internet went insane April 18, 2019, when manly-man actor Jason Momoa shaved off the beard he’s sported since 2012 to garner attention for the damage to the environment caused by single-use plastic bottles.

The video, posted on his Instagram and at his YouTube channel, shows Momoa and a bearded male friend hiking across rocky desert terrain heavily littered with plastic bottles. It’s sad and dispiriting for the viewer to see firsthand how the people who enjoy being in such a natural place value it so little they despoil it.

Using electric shavers—not the most environmentally friendly choice—Momoa and Friend start in on their facial hair, Momoa talking all the while about the need for change, the environmental damage done by plastics, and the fast recyclability of aluminum. There’s no need for bottled water to come in plastic which gets thrown away or becomes litter, he says. Instead, water could be sold in aluminum containers, which recycle endlessly.

Lo and behold, as Momoa continues to bare more and more of the lower face only the longtime fans recognize, he bares the real reason for this video. He is developing a line of canned waters with Ball Corporation of Colorado. While his motive for the enterprise surely includes what’s good for Mother Earth, it’s about what’s good for Jason Momoa. Ugh. Does a symbolic deed still count if it’s  monetized?

Here’s what the video doesn’t do.

• It doesn’t encourage Momoa’s many fans to deal with their own plastic waste responsibly.
• It doesn’t propose legislation such as New York’s, with plastic bottles, including water, subject to a refundable five-cent deposit—the end result being that people pick up discarded bottles everywhere they’re found. (As a veteran hiker of New York’s parks, trails, and canals, I’ve never seen plastic litter like Momoa’s video shows.)
• It doesn’t suggest that fans of Momoa or his stance on plastic waste clean up plastic and other litter on sight, or that they coordinate to remove plastic waste from public sites.
• It doesn’t imply that Momoa and Friend intend to do anything to clear the site where they recorded this video of the unsightly plastic debris which made it the right place for their purpose.

That’s how I would have liked this video to end, with Momoa and Friend filling up the pink climber’s bag Momoa carries (promoted on his previous Instagram post), and another, and another, maybe with families, kids, and other friends of the planet joining in, until there’s a lot of people, long row of bagged plastics ready to carry out, and a clean landscape the way Nature made it. Pan the scene, cut.

Addendum: And the truth behind the self-serving comes out. Yes, it was indeed time for change, not only to introduce Momoa’s canned waters. Momoa’s next Instagram post shows him with a fellow cast member of the Dune remake which began production that day—a role for which Momoa has to be clean-shaven.