The Book of Awesome (29 page)

A tiny Korean guy with thin eyes hidden behind thick glasses under a
well-worn and faded ball cap
, he looked kind of mousy under awkwardly baggy clothes and behind a soft voice. And even though neither of us drank much,
we met at a bar
—me speed-sucking a gin and tonic through a needle-thin straw, him warming a well-nursed beer and occasionally taking
baby sips
.

When he mentioned he was from Boston, I asked about the
Red Sox
and he played along well enough. “Big win last night,” he offered cautiously. “Maybe still have a chance at the playoffs?” Of course, that launched me on a rant about the bullpen and whether
Curt Schilling
had enough steam for another big run. He nodded on, listening intently, asking genuine and serious questions, and letting our friendship take root over sports, of all things. Of course, he never watched the stuff, but was nice enough to let me talk mindlessly about it all night.

Full of wry smiles, awkward pauses, and
mock-serious faces
, Chris was a complex, fascinating, creative person who grew into a remarkably close friend during the two years we went to school together. He got excited about little things, like
caramelizing onions
perfectly for an hour on low heat, getting randomly selected to fill out a survey of his radio habits, or learning a new keyboard shortcut in
Microsoft Excel
.

But it wasn’t the
bar scene
that helped our friendship bloom. It was the
car scene
.

Yeah, when I showed up to class on our first winter morning,
shivering to the bone
in a flimsy nylon coat, my hair wet, my face dripping, Chris asked where I lived and if I needed a ride the next day. As I was at that moment toweling my face off with a fistful of
balled-up Kleenex
, I took him up on it right away. (Lucky for me Chris had signed up to be a senior student in an undergrad residence way off campus, spending his free time for two years
chaperoning social events
, holding heads above toilets, and editing two or three resumes a night at a steady clip.)

Anyway, he began picking me up every morning for the next two years, probably at least a
couple hundred rides
, never once accepting money for gas because, as he said, “I’m going that way anyway.” When other students heard about my taxi service, they got in on it too. It started with a “Hey Chris, if there’s a blizzard tomorrow, can I catch a lift?” and turned into Chris emailing three or four of us each night, giving us the
Bus Schedule
, as he called it, timed precisely to the minute for the next morning. And so it went—us piling into his car after he’d spent the first few minutes warming it up for us, tightly blanketed in fat mittens and his trademark
big blue hat
.

Last year I nervously started up the website that inspired this book, tentatively dipping my toe into cyberspace where anyone could see. Chris of course adopted his Mexican half-brother pseudonym
San Carlos
and peppered the site with comments of support from the get-go. On
Popping Bubble Wrap
he wrote, “I learned on the news that Bubble Wrap is a fantastic insulator because of the trapped air, so if you’re cold DO NOT POP IT but wrap yourself in it.” On
Paying for something with exact change
he wrote, “I save all my pennies in my car. And then, the next time I do McDonald’s drive-thru, I fling all the pennies into the server’s face. . . . No actually, I put the pennies into the Ronald McDonald’s House box underneath the window.” On
Playing with a baby and not having to change its diaper
he wrote, “I don’t mind changing my nephews’ diapers. It only got weird when they began to talk. Awkward!”

I loved his sense of humor and his way about himself. I loved how he laughed, frequently, at little things and got so excited about tiny details most people overlooked. Chris and I spoke three or four times a week after we graduated, in
ten or fifteen minute
snippets usually, but sometimes for an hour or two. He’d tell me about the sourdough bread he was baking that day, the elaborate meal he had planned for friends coming for dinner, or the
New York Times
article he thought I should check out. I would ask him for ideas for awesome things—he had plenty—and occasionally go on long rants about sports.

Chris died suddenly last year. He was thirty-two.

No amount of the usual closing rhyming couplets or
fist-to-the-sky proclamations
are going to bring him back. But I know he’s in a peaceful place and would want us all to just be happy, keep plugging, and enjoy our lives as fully as we can. So thank you, Chris. You’ll always inspire me.

And you’ll always be so incredibly awesome.

Over dinner one night my dad started telling me about his first day in Canada.

It was 1968 and he was twenty-three, arriving on a plane with
eight dollars
in his pocket to start a new life by himself in a country he had never visited.

“A community group had a welcome dinner for new immigrants,” he started excitedly. “And they had a big table of food!”

I was unimpressed.

“A table of food,” I agreed flatly while staring straight ahead and flipping past baseball highlights on TV.

“A table of food,” he continued. “Basically, Neil, all the presentation of the picnic food on the table, I didn’t recognize. There were two or three kinds of salad. Potato salad,
macaroni salad
, maybe coleslaw. Probably four different kinds of sandwiches, ham sandwich, turkey sandwich, chicken sandwich, roast beef sandwich. Then there were the main courses they called it, you know, tuna casserole? Then the dessert was pies. Which I never seen pies before.”

I put down the remote and glanced at him cockeyed. Behind the thick, boxy glasses, I could see his eyes darting wildly.

“How did you know what everything was?”

“My brother was there, so I will ask him and he told me whatever it is. The trays of cold cuts was different, instead of regular chicken they have sliced them, sometimes they have them rolled with the toothpick in them. I had never seen cold cuts before, I seen chicken in chicken form but not rolled up. Same for cheese . . . some were in slices, some of them in squares.”

“What did you eat?” I asked.

“I ate everything, that’s the only way to get to know! I can’t believe how many different things you can get here!”

My dad would take me to the grocery store and marvel at the signs beside every fruit. He was fascinated that pineapples came from Costa Rica and kiwis were shipped from New Zealand. Sometimes he came home and opened an atlas to find out where the countries were. “Somebody brought dates from Morocco and dropped them five minutes from home.”

He’d just smile and shake his head.

But if I really stop to think about it, a lot had to happen before we could be here right now. A lot had to happen before we could buy bananas from Ecuador and eat turkey cold cuts, before we could flip through books about warm underwear and cool pillows, before we learned to read anything at all, before we grew tall, before we could talk, before we could walk, before we were even born. . . .

Okay.

You used to be a sperm.

Now don’t get self-conscious. We all used to be sperm. Check out the period at the end of this sentence. That tiny little dot is around 600 microns wide. When you were a sperm, you were about 40 microns wide. And you were so cute back then too, with your
little tail
wagging all over the place and your love of swimming. Boy, could you swim. In fact, if you hadn’t outswum your siblings, you might be a slightly different version of yourself right now. Maybe you’d have a higher-pitched laugh,
hairier arms
, or stand two inches shorter.

You had a great life as a sperm but always felt incomplete. The truth is you weren’t whole until you met an egg. And then you two began a nine-month project to make a cool new version of you. It took a while but you grew arms and legs and eyeballs and lungs. You grew nerves and nails and ear-drums and tongues.

For a sperm to meet an egg it means your mom met your dad. But it’s not just them. Think about how many people had to meet, fall in love, and make love for you to be here. Here’s the answer: a lot. Like
a lot
a lot.

Before they had you, none of your ancestors drowned in a pond, got strangled by a python, or skied into a tree. None of your ancestors choked on a peach pit, was trampled by buffalo, or got their tie stuck in an assembly line.

None of your ancestors was a virgin.

You are the most
modern, brightest spark
of years and years and years of survivors who all had to meet each other in order to eventually make you.

Your nineteenth-century Grandma met your nineteenth-century Grandpa down at the candle-making shoppe. She liked his
muttonchops
and he thought she looked cute churning butter.

Your Middle Ages Grandpa met your Middle Ages Grandma while they both poured hot oil from the castle turrets on
pillaging Vikings
. She liked his grunts and he thought the flowers in her hair made her heaving bosoms jump out.

Your Ice Age Grandpa crossing the Bering Bridge in a woolly mammoth fur met your Ice Age Grandma dragging a club in the opposite direction. He liked her
saber-toothed necklace
and she dug his unibrow.

Your ancient rainforest Grandpa was picking berries naked in the bush while your ancient rainforest Grandma was spearing dodos for dinner. She liked his
jungle funk
and he liked her cave drawings. If it wasn’t for the picnic they had afterward, maybe you wouldn’t be here.

You’re pretty lucky all those people met, fell in love, made love, had babies, and raised them into other people who did it all over again. This happened over and over and over again for you to be here. Look around the plane, coffee shop, or park right now. Look at your husband snoring in bed, your girlfriend watching TV, or your sister playing in the backyard.
You are surrounded by lucky people.
They are all the result of long lines of survivors.

So you’re a survivor too. You’re the latest and greatest. You’re the top of the line. You’re the very best nature has to offer.

But a lot had to happen before all your strong, fiery ancestors met each other and fell in love over and over again for hundreds of thousands of years. . . .

Okay.

Let’s go on a field trip. Put your shoes on because we’re heading outside.

Take a bowling ball and drop it on the edge of your driveway. That’s our Sun. Yeah, the ball is only eight inches across and the actual sun is
eight hundred thousand miles
across, but that’s our scale for this little brain wave. Okay, now walk down your street ten big paces and drop a grain of salt on your neighbor’s lawn.
That’s Mercury.
Take nine more paces down the street and drop a peppercorn for Venus. And then take another seven paces, so you’re now
two or three houses
down the block, and toss down another peppercorn.

You got it.

That peppercorn is Earth.

Here we are, basking in the blazing sun, twenty-six big steps away from the bowling ball. Our giant planet is just a tiny speck in the
middle of nowhere
, but here’s the crazy part: It gets a whole lot bigger.

If you keep walking, Mars is only a couple more houses away, but Jupiter ends up
ninety-five big paces
down the street, out of the neighborhood, and halfway to the corner store. By now a dog is probably slobbering in the bowling ball finger holes and kids are flying by you on their bikes, slurping
drippy Popsicles
and wondering what’s up with this nut tossing crumbs on the sidewalk, acting out some demented suburban version of Hansel and Gretel.

If you want to finish up our solar system, you’re going to have to start taking two- and three-hundred paces for the remaining planets, eventually dropping a grain of salt for Pluto
half a mile
away from the bowling ball. You can’t see the bowling ball with binoculars and it’s getting cold out for your long walk home.

But here’s the crazier part: That’s just
our
solar system. That’s just
our
bunch of rocks flying around
our
big bright bowling ball star.

Turns out our big bright star and all its salt grains and peppercorns are racing around a cosmic racetrack with
two hundred billion
other big bright bowling ball stars. You’d have to cover the entire Earth with bowling balls
eight thousand times
to represent the number of stars in our racetrack. Did we mention this racetrack has a name? Yup, it’s called the Milky Way galaxy, presumably because the scientists who first noticed it were all eating delicious Milky Way candy bars late that Friday night down at the telescopes.