In recognition of National Library Month

In recognition of National Library Month (or something like that) the UC Davis School of Medicine library served free coffee, tea, and - depending on how long after they set them out on the table you got there - cookies. Now, really quickly before I go on, I’d like to clear my conscience, and my record. I did indulge in both tea and cookie, even though I have never contributed anything to the UC Davis School of Medicine, financially or otherwise, and in fact even used up some of their toilet paper and soap in the bathroom. It is my – and my conscience’s – hope that Jason’s tuition over the next four years will pay for my celebration of National Library Month. If your conscience tells you otherwise, please don’t let me know, because I have a guilty suspicion that I wouldn’t care. That tea and cookie were delicious!

But matters of the conscience are really not what this entry is about. This entry is concerned with the much more philosophical topic of cookies. And stickers, a little bit. But mostly cookies. Cookies and stickers have something very relevant in common. It’s relevant because it has to do with joy. And with the simplest kind of pleasures. Cookies and stickers are alike because nobody, young or old, can resist them. I watched people as they walked past the coffee-tea-cookie table set up in the library. Coffee and tea were, for most, uninteresting. Coffee and tea are easy to come by. Most of them had had at least eight cups already that morning and many were carrying with them thermoses full of cups nine and ten. But then their eyes would catch the plate of cookies and, without fail, their step slowed. A hesitance came into their conviction that they needed to get over to that table and start studying right away. Cookies had been introduced into their feeble day. Seven out of ten made the unstudious decision to grab one and carried it with ceremony and relish to their study table. The other three, who made the more somber decision to pass by, still could not remove their eyes from the plate of cookies until doing so would require turning around and walking away backwards. One, after passing the table twice, came back and took one after all. This room full of diligent aspiring doctors and nurses, people who got 35s on their MCATs and, in a couple years, will be saving lives, could not resist a measley plate of cookies. (Ah, how beautiful it is to be human!)

Now students are notoriously starving. I’ve known people to sit through hours of boring presentations about things they do not now and never will care the least bit about just for a free sandwich of questionable cheese and day-old bread. Who am I kidding? I’ve done it myself. More than once. Free food is like extra credit in the game of life. And students know all about extra credit, in and out of the classroom. So maybe you think a bunch of graduate students rejoicing over a plate of cookies is no great indicator of the cookies’ power. But let me tell you about the doctor who came in.

Middle aged, balding Indian man with serious glasses. Tall, wearing nice slacks and a tie and a white coat. The long kind, that goes below your knees and shows you’re the real deal. A physician. A seasoned one, by the looks of him. He came in and went straight to one of the low shelves in front. He knew where he was going and what he was looking for. He pulled out a ginormous encyclopedia-like book and opened it up, thumbing confidently through the pages. He pulled out another, then another. He spread out four or five doctor-reference books across the low shelves and pored over them, running his fingers up and down the pages. This guy had something on his mind.

I don’t know when he noticed the cookies. I was busy writing, or contemplating life, or brushing cookie crumbs off my shirt. All I know is that I looked up to see the doctor striding across the floor to the cookie table (no offense to the coffee and tea, but let’s face it, they were merely supplements; the table belonged to the cookies). The encyclopedias were shut, lined up neatly atop the shelf. The doctor was at the plate of cookies. He started with coffee, but his eyes were on the cookies the whole time, contemplating. Everyone knows how they like their coffee without thinking about it. You ask a man how he takes his coffee and he’ll tell you like reflex. Black. Cream. Sugar. But cookies are a little more complicated. Even if you’re certain of your preference. Even if you’re a chocolate chip or an oatmeal raisin or a sugar person, there’s always that ooey gooey chocolate dusted one whose name you’re not sure of but who looks scrumptious in all its mysterious glory. His hands were pouring coffee, but his eyes were on the cookies. (He’s a doctor, he has skills).

Actually, to be really honest, his eyes were on the cookies except for the few brief moments they were on the creamer. (He was a cream, no sugar man). It was that questionable, non-dairy dry stuff whose origins nobody really understands. He didn’t believe it was creamer. He asked another doctor standing nearby – who, incidentally, was munching on a cookie – about it. She assured him it was cream. He was convinced it must be some sort of off-whitish powdery sugar. I don’t think he ended up using it. You can call a shoe an apple until you’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day, it still tastes like shoe. Personally, I think it’s when you question the validity of the creamer, instead of just pouring in whatever you see and scarfing it down, that you know you’ve transitioned from being a student to being a physician. (People tell me there are other ways of telling, but I think that must be the clearest).

But even the physician had nothing on the wiles of the cookie. After the creamer episode, he picked one. With relish and ceremony, just like the students. He sat down to enjoy the National Library Month celebration, but the information he needed from the encyclopedias must have been too pressing. After a few sips, he tossed the coffee and got up. Still munching his cookie, he strolled back to the bookshelves and diligently went back to work, heedless of the cookie crumbs that settling into the book bindings. (He’s a doctor, he doesn’t have to care about cookie crumbs). It doesn’t matter who you are. Young or old, thick or thin, seasoned professional or starving student, there is something wonderful about cookies.

Have you ever seen children at Trader Joe’s or Wal-Mart or somewhere when the cashier or greeter gives them a sticker? One puny, monochromatic, half-a-cent sticker. Have you watched their faces light up? Next time, don’t. Instead, look at the child’s parent. Though parents are just a bystander in the delightful giving and receiving of stickers process, their faces reveal their own personal delight. And parents know that sometimes, if it’s a good day, the sticker becomes theirs after all, clinging to a purse or cell phone after the child has melted away into peaceful slumber. It’s not just a reaction to seeing their child happy. I’m convinced that it’s the sticker itself that brings a twinkle to a parent’s eye. Give the child a lollypop and the parent will likely become concerned about grown-up things, like stickiness and cavities more than with their child’s delight. But give the child a sticker and the parent can’t help but smile. With age and wisdom, a parent may forget the cherry-watermelon-raspberry jubilee of flavor in a sucker, but somehow, as with cookies, we never forget the simple wonderfulness of stickers.

No child ever got spoiled by having too many stickers. They’re not destructive like markers can be. The worst case is nothing a little goo-gone can’t fix. Stick ‘em on virtually any surface and after a good day’s work, they’ll peel right off again. Price tags will not. Price tags are not real stickers. Smiley faces are real stickers. And Lisa Frank kittens, and hologram dolphins and frogs, and sometimes letters that spell out your name in different colors. R-o-y-a. Or y-o-R-a if you get too excited and accidentally stick them on wrong.

But I don’t think parents like stickers just because they’re less destructive to the furniture and a child’s mental well-being. I think parents like stickers because they are irresistible. Have you ever noticed how excited people get over the “I Voted” stickers at the polling place? The love of stickers is totally non-partisan. You might vote “yes” and I might vote “no,” but we share solidarity in that small inexplicable burst of joy we get over that little waving flag sticker. The polls are the one place where stickers are for grown-ups, not for kids. I know people who vote just to get the sticker. I don’t condone it, but I don’t blame them either. I secretly suspect people who vote absentee of some small thread of lunacy simply because they knowingly forfeit their flag sticker rights.

Cookies and stickers. There's something magical there. I don't get it, but I feel it. Simple pleasures. Small joys. It's nothing to write home about, but it works on almost everyone. Maybe not profound, just some dough or gluey bits of paper. But it makes me think about what the world's made up of. Something from nothing. Some creativity making for a whole medley of small joys.

-R.E.A.

Oh, let me tell you about the ocean today

Oh, let me tell you about the ocean today. The way it leapt choppy and turquoise in the strong wind. Valiant. Each wave an unsung hero. The way it mingled without mingling with the periwinkle sky hung with charming clouds oblivious. The way the wind unyielding blew the stock still sand into low dust clouds and the palms’ fronds crashed raucously like youth unconquerable, and poppies bobbed and bowed as though it were only a friendly breeze. The way the ocean spray became the air and the whole beautiful golden day was washed in unruly joy.

-R.E.A.

A swallow stirring

Having spent the first large chunk of my last entry discussing my feelings on how little I regard seasons other than Summer, I would like to begin this entry by saying that I have begun getting the stirrings of Autumn in my sinews and they always spark a special kind of excitement in me. I admit that I find myself a little angry at Summer this year. September sixth is entirely much too early for Fall and I wonder what Summer’s rush is. I am frustrated with myself, too, for the excitement that I feel. This happens to me every year. The changing seasons work a magic on me and I am ready for whatever comes. Especially Fall. But it is also with Fall that I regret the most. Because several weeks or a couple months, or even sometimes only a day or two in, I think back longingly upon Summer: warm feet and boogie boarding and...well, you know all about that, and I spend the rest of the year missing her. So there, that’s just how it is. I am angry and frustrated and sad and yet somehow tentatively inspired by the Autumn smell that keeps blowing in my window this week. As Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself... ”

If I could, I would let the seasons change every three months, as is their wont, but each time they would change to a new season for merely a few weeks and then they would faze right back into Summer. It’s bland of me, I know. And ungrateful. Peter Spier wrote a children’s book called People in which he talks about how boring it would be if everyone and everything were all the same, lacking different cultures and tastes. And doubtless, seasons fit into this concept as well. It is boring and unenlightened of me to want it to be Summer all the time. Perhaps it is immature. But in this, I concede to being childish. I don’t think I can help it. You see, I’m love struck.

But that being said. There is something old that awakens in a young soul at Autumn’s dawn. It is timeless and pecular and sage. Perhaps it is Fall itself, unfolding inside us and greeting her other half without. It whispers of nostalgia, and of a deep-rooted and unyielding joy as boundless as the world itself. It’s a swallow, and a wild rose, and a misty grey mountain, and a falling russet leaf. It is unsettling and invigorating both at the same time. It is greater and stronger and older and wiser than I, but it is in me, then, at the turning of the seasons, for a brief spell, while Fall emerges.

And then there is the sound of football playing on the TV, the only time I can appreciate ambient television noise while I am going about my everyday life. And really, if it’s Fall time, something is sorely missing without it. It’s the sound of the cheering and the whistles that makes you think of huddling around the screen, waving Terrible Towels and munching on football snacks and sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows and tiptoeing outside in a scarf to feel the blustery chill of pre-dusk and the smell of cold that reminds you that you are alive and makes you love everything. It’s the sound of yelling from the next room that makes you jump out of your seat so high that you hit the ceiling and then in the same motion bolt out to catch the replay of whatever you just missed. And for me, now that I’m out of school for the time being, it’s the free and beautiful feeling of not having to bury myself in school work just at the moment when I feel most like curling up under a blanket and indulging in my own personal thoughts and enjoyments instead of some aggravating instructor’s incoherent syllabus.

Don’t get me wrong, Fall, this message goes out even to lovely you, I am yet unwilling to wave the Summer of 2010 farewell. The sand was still warm when I roamed on the beach yesterday and I can still smell bonfire some nights wafting down PCH from Huntington. We are barbequing burgers tonight, Summer dear, and my boots are tucked artfully away in my closet for another day. It’s still only preseason. All I’m admitting is this: in the days ahead, when my feet turn numb and hunker down into the wool hiking socks that I stole from Jason for the rest of the year; when the Summer beach tourists fade away and parking on Main Street is no longer impossible and damp wind sweeps in from off the ocean so strong and chilly that it numbs the nose in the crash of a wave; when my heart comes to that sad, sad, sadness of Summer gone and that restlessness wedges in my bones and makes me miss things I have never had; when lady Autumn is truly upon us, you’ll find me perched on my bed by the window, breathing in the crisp, sweet air, with a good book and a cup of tea and perhaps a foxish little cat sitting on my feet; and I will be okay.

-R.E.A.

An impertinent title that has nothing to do with the entry that follows

Yesterday evening was the last Band at the Beach performance of the year and to keep my sanity, I had to remind myself several hundred times that just because September is here and school is back, and it gets dark way too early, Summer is not technically over yet. People can rave about the beauty of Autumn, and how Winter probably has the best holidays, and hurrah for lusty scarf and hot chocolate days; and I know the wildflowers bloom in Spring, and there is certainly something mysterious and lovely in the changing of the seasons, but nobody could ever convince me that Summer isn’t the most inspiring, joy-inducing, wonderful season of them all. Summer is the barefoot, free-spirited, sunshine, fresh-cut-grass Queen of the Year and I love her. And so, after her three months fly by, it is always hard for me to let her go. As an homage to Summer, I made a list of some reasons why:

• Bare feet in the warm sand is the simplest form of happiness.
• Flip flops, and sweet tea, and fruit smoothies, and sunbathing, and the windows down.
• Long days.
• Summer memories.
• The ocean. And ocean water, the best skin-toner and hair-shiner I have ever found.
• Blissfully warm toes. (From approximately late September until late May, my feet are in a perpetual state of coldness. In the Summer, they come out from their wool sock wrappings and layers of blankets and, for three fleeting months, are warm again.)
• Humidity.
• Fireflies.
• Homegrown tomatoes.
• Fresh berries. (And fresh berry cobbler).
• Bonfires.

So back to Band at the Beach, yesterday evening, and the Elm Streetband playing songs like “Summer of ’69,” and “Brown-eyed Girl,” and “Hotel California.” We were sipping wine and snacking and looking out at the ocean and the palm trees and the American flag at the foot of the pier, and watching the day turn to dusk and loving life. It got me thinking about one of my favorite Ty Herndon songs where he says, “Tell me something, who could ask for more / than to be living in a moment you would die for.”

I had just spent the day poring over my CSET study materials at the bookstore. Too much air-conditioning, too much sitting still, too much eye strain, too much stress (I really am stressing out a lot about this exam). And the only thing that kept me at it so diligently was the knowledge that I’d spend the evening draped on a blanket at the beach, listening to good music, sipping wine with some of my favorite people, at one of my favorite places in all the world. And sitting there, in a moment that represented all the things I value most, a moment “I would die for,” unwinding, I got that sense of satisfied exhaustion that the best little and big events of life bring me.

I think it’s that exhaustion that makes the memories. That moment after the Moment (or sometimes during) where you contemplate it, let it sink in, and truly realize how good it made you feel. It comes in all forms in life: physical, emotional, intellectual, perhaps even spiritual. It seems to me that some of the best feelings in life come in these still moments of exhaustion: the times that I feel healthiest, and happiest, and strongest, and most secure and certain, when my perspective is the clearest.

There are times, after a good run, after I’ve worked the kinks out of my legs and my breath is coming a little easier, that I lay flat on my back on the driveway, against concrete warm from the day, and look up at the sky, usually sprinkled with a few stars or Venus or the moon – and this is going to sound really new age and hippie and maybe a little creepy, but I can feel the Earth working. I can feel the natural world moving and growing and struggling, I can feel peace and war, and I can feel the skeleton of the world, the rocks and mountains and minerals, solid and strong. I can feel God. And sometimes, I even catch little glimpses of my place in the scheme of it. My blood is flowing and my skin is glowing from the run and my body’s exhausted and somehow my brain is clearer and I feel healthy and strong in body and mind and I am totally grounded.

The same thing happens when I spend a day in the ocean. My irrational fear of crabs aside, I love everything about the seashore. They say if you are born by the ocean it is in your blood and I believe it. One time, I went surfing. For a little while I floated on my stomach on the board over and between the waves, getting the feel of the board and the tide. My confidence mounting, and Jason instructing me from the water, I decided to ride a wave, just on my stomach, nothing heroic. I picked the wrong wave. An experienced surfer might have been able to ride it, but probably wouldn’t have bothered. It wasn’t the type of wave that carries you gracefully toward shore. It was that temperamental, ornery sort that slaps hard against you and tumbles you under. I didn’t know it was the wrong wave until it was on me. I watched Jason’s face turn from focused attentiveness to a look of concern. Then he yelled something un-encouraging. The look on his face, his response to my completely hopeless situation was too much for me. I went under laughing. Laughing is all well and wonderful, but it doesn’t give you much of a chance to hold your breath. I came up scraped, bruised, choking…and laughing. I couldn’t get his face out of my head. I left the beach scraped, bruised, breathless, laughing, and tired. Salty, water-logged, and exhausted, that is the only healthy way to leave the sand. A run, a swim, going on a walk with an over-exuberant dog, a long hike, horseback riding, they all bring on the physical version of this exhaustion I’m talking about.

But there are other kinds. For a couple years, I worked at an elementary school in downtown Long Beach as a teacher’s aid. One of my favorite things that I’ve ever done in my life. I generally worked with kids in small groups or one-one-one and helped them with everything from reading (my favorite!) to math. Some of them had actual behavioral issues (products of drug-using parents and stuff like that), some were just too young (six is way too immature for the valuable knowledge you are expected to gain in first grade), nearly all of them lacked basic manners. I spent less time teaching kids the alphabet than I did teaching them how to sit still long enough to hear it recited. If I had thirty minutes to spend with a small group, I could expect that at least fifteen of them would be spent getting them to keep their feet off the table and their hands to themselves, and at least five of them would be spent at the end getting them to line up in a quiet row to leave. That left ten minutes to teach five struggling children to read Is Your Mama a Llama? (Or, as one of my favorite students, Geraldo, insisted on calling it, “Is Tu Mama a Wama?”)

So on group days, I would start by going through my rules. Now I’m a rather organic person – the type who gets uncomfortable around Bonsai Trees and has some new-fangled notions on how children should be treated – so it took me perhaps longer than most to realize how important these rules were. As a compromise between upholding my beliefs and maintaining my sanity, I kept my rules simple and few, but I stressed to the kids that they were critically important.

One typical day, Louisa came in “tattling” about how Louis, who I had already observed had an obvious head-over-heels crush on her, had called her a despicable name. I looked over at Louis, one of those students who just breaks your heart because he is so smart and capable and so much stubborn trouble, and he was making an obscene face at Louisa and her voice was getting louder and louder in complaint. I knew there was no way for me to win because everyone was fully prepared to deny everything against them and claim unbridled innocence, so I did the only thing a good teacher can do. I copped out. Looking at Louisa, I asked, “What is my number one rule?” She rolled her eyes and recited it, Louis mouthing insolently along with her, “always be nice.”

I’ll be honest, I wish it were more pithy. I love words and something like, “To err on the side of kindness is seldom an error,” or “The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid” would have made me feel much better, but I’ve learned that witty anecdotes are unappreciated by most first graders (although it is delightful to talk to those ones who understand them), so the rule was just “be nice.” Be nice because I don’t want to referee between you. Be nice because we have a hard book to read today and there’s no time to argue. Be nice because I abhor meanness, especially when it is petty. Be nice because you will need it later – because the more difficult your life is and the more un-niceness you encounter, the more you will require it. Be nice because there is too little of it in the world. Be nice because, more than you know, even more than I can understand, I want you, sassy Louisa and stubborn Louis, to be twenty five years old and kind.

With kids, you can’t ever only be paying half attention, not only because you will find, when you turn around, that they have slingshotted all your erasers around the room and stuck pencils to the ceiling, but also because you will find that the moment your mind wanders just the littlest bit, to lunch, or the errands you still need to run, or that story you’ve been working on, they will hit you with a question so poignant and relevant that the entire universe stands still to carefully await your response. (And trust me, there is nothing like the pressure of knowing the entire universe is awaiting your response to leave you tongue tied, unless it is a small earnest first grader staring you intently in the face). Better yet, they will tell you a story.

“My brother came home yesterday,” Christopher, aged five, told me as we sat at a table in the back of the class with a book opened in front of us. “Really, from where?” I asked naively. “They got him in jail,” he told me, unabashed. “The police came and they put handcuffs on him, but he’s back now with his girlfriend.” His unhesitating words were accompanied by hand gestures and there was no chance for me to be embarrassed by my question for the earnestness of his response. Besides, I was busy trying to come up with a smooth way to transition from criminal family members to rhyming words. I could practically hear the universe snickering at me.

I only worked short five or six hour shifts three days a week at the elementary school, but those hours left me drained. The hours I spent, and spend, thinking about those kids: the things they said, the ways I wanted to treat them, what I hoped they would learn from me, and what I had learned from them, far surpassed the time I spent in their presence. It made me laugh and cry, it inspired me, it made me think, it left me exhausted.

You know what I think it is? It is an exhaustion borne of an utter lack of apathy. As an aside, I will tell you that I abhor apathy. I think it is a despicable quality, particularly for a race of animals that is supposed to be self-conscious and aware. You can disagree with me, you can be uninformed, or unintelligent, or aggravating in a hundred other ways, but you only really become worthless when you become apathetic. Those moments of healthy exhaustion grow, I think, from caring. From working your body or your brain or exercising your emotions. From feeling. This is the kind of exhaustion that I hope for in life. There is a quote from Albert Schweitzer that plays through my mind at both my most and least ambitious moments: “The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.” And so, I think, these moments of exhaustion are, ironically, our chances to become renewed and re-inspired, to last another day, another hundred days, another hundred years. For me, a day well spent, a successful day, is one that ends in utter exhaustion. The invigorating exhaustion of knowing that you cared, that you gave it all you had, that you took as little as possible fore granted, that the joyful awareness of this Moment is a happiness that you have earned.

-R.E.A.

A roving book gathers no dust

It’s amazing how peaceful and still a bookstore can be early in the morning, a few hours after the closing booksellers have locked up, trickled into their respective homes, and tucked their aching feet into bed; before the front door has unlocked for the day’s customers and all their human joys and problems. It’s the kind of amazing you can only really understand if you’ve worked in a bookstore and been cured of the misguided notion that they are calm, orderly places to begin with, stocked with friendly, fashionably dusty books, or stately classics standing sentinel on shelves awaiting passionate and slightly nerdy readers to pull them off, smell their pages with secret delight, and take them home to sit on nicer, wooden bookshelves and grow old with the thumbing of eager fingers. If ever all my dreams come true and I find myself owner of my own small bookshop on Main Street, this is the way my books – and my customers – will be. And I shall reserve the right to refuse service to anyone who doesn’t have proper book etiquette.

Most bookstores, however, hope to at least scrape by with a semblance of a profit and will take any customers they can get. And so the modern bookstores – at least the ones that survive – are corporate and trendy, a marketer’s dream, and sit in strip malls next to restaurants and movie theaters where people who find themselves with time to spare between the two can wander in, collect dozens of magazines from their proper places on the shelves, and plant them stealthily throughout the store, behind books, under tables, and in the bathrooms, as an amusing pastime before the movie starts. In the modern bookstore, the doors open and awaiting customers rush in to buy the latest self help or “How to Become A Millionaire on 20 Cents a Day” book to the whir of the blender mixing up frappuccinos and lattes in the cafe where not even a small tidy bookish cat is allowed to show so much as a whisker for fear of violating some health code or another. For this, the rest of the store suffers too: no cat napping on a stack of books, no singing canary or tended geranium in the window to let you know you are in a place of beauty and truth and excitement and intellect, a place of kindred souls, and paradoxically opinionated harmony.

Back in the children’s section, some disobedient child or another strings books and plush across the floor in clear sight of its conveniently near sighted parent who has some newfangled opinions about never telling a child “no” and who apparently never learned manners from the child’s grandparents. Some blasphemous faux-author has published a book called Pride and Predjudice and Zombies and it sits shamelessly on the shelf next to J.R.R. Tolkien, pretending not to hear Jane Austin rolling over in her grave. And some young teenager who will never know the joys of Wuthering Heights or Gone With the Wind picks it up and walks around the store with it until she either buys it or deposits it on a shelf somewhere in the travel section. The globes are plastic, not metal, and nobody ever looks at them.

And by midnight, because corporate retailers don’t have the decency to close at a godly hour, the store is a veritable mess, with manga, and sex books, and magazines, and crummy children’s literature lying in heaps thither and yon and Poe and Shakespeare forgotten on a shelf somewhere. The computers are whirring, and the air conditioning, and the florescent lights. And booksellers are marching back and forth like sleepy ants collecting and replacing and tidying here and there.

The few dark hours that the bookstore catches to itself are, I suspect, more peaceful than any I have seen there. I observe it only at the end of these dark hours, when the booksellers come trickling back in, only a couple at a time, and set to work again. But the store feels rested. Rested and renewed, and the books do stand rather like sentinels, proud upon their shelves. Though by tonight, they will lie again, haphazard and bent, this morning they represent anew the truths within them, they recall the paths they have forged and lighted. This is the time when I walk between the shelves, my feet soft against the carpet, and the store is a place for books again: not uncouth children or negligent adults, or movie-goers or complainers, or caffeine junkies, or thieves or Playboy purchasers – though true readers can be all of these things. When you strip away all the corporate retail “charms,” you find that after all there is something innate in printed volumes that remains intact despite all these things. And it is amazing to find, in those few early hours, that you can still hear their quiet, timeless strength and wisdom.

-R.E.A.