I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (16 page)

WEDNESDAY.

Tucker shows up at my office because he “needed a reason to put on pants.”

“Why's there a sheet of fabric softener in your garbage?” he asks.

It had been stuck to the back of my sweater all day. When I finally discovered it, I felt like I hadn't a true friend in the office.

“I brought it from home,” I say, not entirely lying. “It's like potpourri. A sheet of Bounce and some orange peels in the trash really sweetens up an office.”

“Then why's the place still smelling like boiled eggs?” he asks.

“I had eggs for lunch.”

Studied or ignored. Each can be painful in its own way.

THURSDAY.

While riding home on the bus, I pull off the headphones I've recently bought to readjust them. In so doing I discover that, due to their open design, the backs of the ear cups have been acting as speakers.What this means is that, unbeknownst to me, I've been sharing my music with everyone.

The idea that a busload of strangers has been able to judge me for my musical taste—examine me as I listen to “Dancing Queen” in the supposed privacy of my headphones—is mortifying. I review a long list of the public humiliations I've endured since the purchase, and stop myself after yesterday's crowded elevator ride while listening to “Eye of the Tiger” for fear of inducing an anxiety attack.

Private music made public, walking against the foot traffic—this is what makes living among humans such a challenge. Society is a bunch of people who can perceive you in a way that you cannot perceive yourself.

I put the headphones back on and press play. I meet the gaze of the teenagers sitting opposite me. I tell myself that my new headphones are character-building as I lower the volume.

Another Lap Around

(2 weeks)

MONDAY.

I've flown to New York for the week, and the hotel I'm staying at has a scale in the bathroom called the “Health o Meter.”

When the Health o Meter goes full circle, after it reaches 280 pounds, it still offers little numbers for the second lap around. So underneath the 10, 20, 30, and onward, in finer print, it offers the numbers 290, 300, etc.

What I like about this is that if you weigh 280, you don't have to feel like the heaviest man the Health o Meter serves.You can look at those numbers that come afterwards and think, “I may be heavy—but there are some
really
heavy guys out there.” For this reason, I feel that scales should go all the way into the thousands.Why not? To some extent, life is all about looking for whatever you can to make you feel like you're not the last stop—not the heaviest, not the worst,
not the oldest—that there is always “some guy” out there. This might account for the popularity of reality television.

TUESDAY.

While browsing in a bookstore, I discover a book about learned optimism and decide to take the test inside. It's composed of forty-eight questions designed to show where one falls on the optimism–pessimism spectrum.

I spend the better part of an hour thoughtfully answering questions like: “You fall down while skiing; a) Skiing is difficult, or b) The trails were icy.” Having never been skiing, I answer a). (It turns out that the right answer is b).) When I'm finished I consult the scoring key, and after much calculation and recalculation, I finally accept the book's final assessment. I am what it terms “moderately hopeless.”

At first I am saddened, but later I come to a happier conclusion: moderate hopelessness can't really be that different from moderate hopefulness. Is the man half-filled with hope or hopelessness? I'd like to think hope, and in this way I believe myself to be making progress: I am becoming more optimistic about my pessimism.

WEDNESDAY.

In line for a hamburger, I eavesdrop on the teenager ordering in front of me.

“A hamburger,” he says. “No onions.”

His order captures the heartbreaking optimism of youth. “Maybe I'll meet someone tonight. Maybe we'll get close enough for my onionless breath to matter. Maybe I will perfectly execute some high-kicking, fresh-breathed dance and make all those around me gasp.”

“One hamburger,” I say when it's my turn.“All dressed. To go.”

Conversely, my order conveys the heartbreaking pessimism of adulthood. I don't even ask for napkins. Why bother? I've got sleeves.

THURSDAY.

At a café, I order a chocolate chip cookie.

“One cookie is sixty-nine cents,” says the woman at the cash. “But three cookies are ninety-nine cents.”

“That's okay,” I say.

As I walk away with my sad, lonely cookie, I'm reminded of Ambrose Bierce's definition, from his early 1900s
Devil's Dictionary
, of an abstainer: “a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.” The book contains no definition of a person who yields to a third of a pleasure.

If I were to write a dictionary of definitions that pertains to my own life, it would include such words as
time
(“that which is always there to assure me I am late”),
moderately hopeless
(“one who purchases a sixty-dollar warranty
for a three-hundred-dollar radio, and, in anticipation of getting his money's worth, anxiously awaits its malfunction”), and, of course,
moderately hopeful
(“one who orders his hamburgers with onions on the side, so that in case things don't work out, there's at least onions for later”).

As I finish the last bite of my cookie, I am reminded of yet another definition that could go in the book—“cookie: an object that when eaten in singularity can produce dreadful yearning.”

I get up and buy a second sixty-nine-cent cookie and, being the foolish, moderately hopeful creature that I am, I do not consider partaking of the special. This despite the fact that both the cashier and I know I'll be back once again, probably within the next several minutes, for a third.

Face to Face

(1 week)

SATURDAY, 10:00 A.M.

Having returned home from New York after midnight, I wake up late and walk into the living room to watch cartoons. Boosh, asleep on the couch, is stirred awake. No sooner does she achieve consciousness than she is growling at me.

“Booshie,” I say, my voice slipping into the easy falsetto of a man addressing a poodle in the privacy of his own home, “don't you even know me anymore?”

In reply, Boosh lets loose a series of barks, yips, and snarls that make me feel like a hobo trying to steal pie off a windowsill.

I turn around and leave the room and she settles back into the couch. I should probably wash my face and get ready for the day anyway. That dog brings out the best in me.

10:15 A.M.

While brushing my teeth, I stare at myself in the mirror with great intensity. Sometimes I fear that Boosh can see through me—through the thin veil of niceties and pretend goodness that fools friends and family—to my soul.

10:25 A.M.

I've been staring at myself in the mirror far too long and have entered into a dangerous game: trying to see, without sentimentality, what other people see when they look at me.

As a teenager I would lock myself in the bathroom and stare into my own eyes until, through some act of hypnotism, I could no longer recognize that person in the mirror as me. At which point I felt liberated, as if I'd escaped my “me-ness.” In that state, I was just another person in the world, born into personhood as my sister had been, as the old Polish butcher who delivered our chicken had been. I could see with clarity how pimply my skin was, how ill-fitting my burgundy turtleneck, and, despite the assurances of well-meaning aunts, how unlike Matt Dillon I actually did look. And like anyone else who wasn't me, I could finally experience the exhilaration of bad-mouthing myself.

10:40 A.M.

I am not as good at this as I was as a teenager, for try as I might, I can still see something in the reflected jumble that is recognizable as “me.” I just can't shake the feeling of kinship with the eyes staring back at me. I guess at this point I've just been me too long.

At thirty-nine, it looks like I can safely assume that this kinship will always be there, whether those eyes in the mirror are sunk in an old man's baked apple of a face or even floating free in a soup bowl of formaldehyde in some future sci-fiworld. There is a part of my brain that is now hard-wired to leap up and claim ownership, that shouts, perhaps against all good sense, “That's me.”

10:50 A.M.

Boosh enters the bathroom. I stop staring at myself and pick her up. She licks my cheek and it feels nice to have someone appreciate my face, even if it's only a poodle looking for breakfast.

Late Bloomers

(40th birthday)

WEDNESDAY.

I boiled eggs for my father and me on Sunday. I used the stopwatch on my wristwatch to make sure they were cooked for the perfect amount of time.Today I see that the stopwatch is still going. It reads seventy-four hours, twelve minutes, and forty-three seconds. Knowing precisely how long it's been since I boiled eggs for my father and me fills me with a sudden sadness about the passing of time.

FRIDAY, 8:00 A.M.

The plan is to drive down to a rest stop in Newburgh, New York, find a hotel room for the night, and then drive back as early as I can to get to Montreal to host my fortieth birthday party.

Having a rest stop as a point of destination feels odd, but I'm headed there to meet up with the producers of the radio show
This American Life
. I'm joining them there for the day to document a place that most people don't even think of as a place so much as somewhere on the way to getting there.

I'm turning forty at the stroke of midnight, and it feels appropriate that it should happen along a highway connecting New York, the place where I was born, and Montreal, the place where I may very well die.

Beethoven plays on the car radio and the music lends my interior monologue about mortality a certain grandeur. Even my thoughts about whether the rest stop will have a Roy Rogers restaurant become imbued with the collective yearning of an entire species.

11:00 A.M.

I stand in the parking lot and look for people to interview. I feel like a teenager at a high school dance, too afraid to approach anyone for fear of being rejected.

A microphone is a bit like a magic wand. Once it's waved, it makes social conventions vanish, allowing you to ask anything you want of anyone. All it takes is the audacity to wave it.

11:30 A.M.

I take the plunge and approach a dad with his three young sons. I ask him which of the three has to sit in the middle and he points to his eldest.

“I have no choice,” the boy says, motioning to each of his brothers. “They'll kill each other without me between them.”

“They can probably use a guy like you in the Middle East,” I say. “Have you ever considered becoming a diplomat someday?”

“I thought about it,” he says, treating the question with great seriousness, “but I think I'd rather become a clown.”

3:15 P.M.

A single mom driving to Lake George with her nine-year-old son, Paul: “These trips are the only times we ever get to have long talks.”

Sitting in the back seat with nothing to do gives Paul time to hatch questions like, “How long would you cry for if I died?” and “Are you ever sorry you married Dad instead of your old boyfriend?”

She says she always tries to answer him honestly, but as he gets older, it becomes harder. During today's drive he asked if she was really Santa. She told him she wasn't and he said he knew it, but she thinks he was just trying to save face.

8:00 P.M.

A group of women out for a bachelorette party. The bride-to-be has no idea where she's being driven.

“All I know is they told me to bring a whistle and flip flops.”

When I ask her friends if they're just messing with her, they all shake their heads no. I ask the bride-to-be if she wouldn't mind standing a few yards away so she can't hear us. Then, once again, I ask her friends about the flip flops and whistle.

“We're totally messing with her,” they say.

12:00 A.M.

“This is the sound of me turning forty,” I say into the microphone. It sounds like rain beginning to fall, the passing of cars and trucks, of life whizzing by. I feel a lot like that bride-to-be who doesn't know where she's going but has faith it's worth getting to and has faith the people who love her won't, in the end, steer her wrong. Maybe we're both not going to get where we thought we would, but surprises are nice, too.

SATURDAY, 6:00 A.M.

I drive back to Montreal to prepare. The last real birthday party I had was when I was six. My mother got the idea for
a party game where you had to pop a balloon as fast as you could to get the pretzel inside. I was freaked out by the idea of hearing a balloon pop, let alone popping one myself. When it was my turn, I sat on my balloon. And nothing happened. I just sort of rolled around on it, pressing down as hard as I could, initially anxious about the popping but eventually concerned that it never would, that I was too tiny and unimportant to make it happen.

After a great deal of laughing from the other kids, my father came over and stepped on the balloon with his loafer. He then scooped up the crushed pretzel and offered it to me.

Over a dinner of hot dogs and chips, my friend Craig Huss wouldn't stop teasing me about needing my father's help, so I poured a glass of orange juice over his hot dog and my mother sent me to my room. It was probably only for a few minutes, but it felt like I was in there the whole party. I still remember how it felt to be lying on my bed and listening to my own party through the closed bedroom door.

I think I'm just about ready for another try.

5:30 P.M.

As guests arrive, I find myself wandering from conversation to conversation. As a result, I catch only snippets.

In the kitchen, Howard and Tony look like they're deep in meaningful conversation.